Newsflash: British air traffic control operator Nats has reveale that the outage which affected hundreds of thousands of passengers last week was due to a software defect. In a report into the disruption, Nats also dismisses claims that the disruption was caused by “military intervention.” Martin Rolfe, Nats chief executive officer, says: “This was a software issue in a specific part of our flight data system, that we have traced to a small subsection of coding. The issue has been identified and mitigation is in place while a permanent fix is safety tested and deployed.” The Financial Times reported last week that four people briefed on the incident claimed that the shutdown was caused by a flight plan submitted by a UK military aircraft.
NATS, though, is blaming “a software defect” in a small part of the National Airspace System (NAS), which is used to manage of UK airspace. Hundreds of thousands of passengers were caught up in the disruption which began on Tuesday 8 September. The software in question allocates codes to individual aircraft when manual requests are made; these are usually allocated automatically.
These codes are used to identify flights on radar when they are airborne. This glitch led to restrictions being put in place to limit air traffic to maintain safety. Although the software issue only affected flights in the London Area Control centre – higher level flights operating mainly above 24,500ft – the restrictions had to be placed across the UK so that the NAS could be restarted and flight data reloaded, it says.
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