BUSINESS NEWS Thousands of flights


were cancelled on bank holiday Monday last year


Nats slammed for lack of ‘resilience planning’


Interim report on Nats shutdown highlights several failures. Ian Taylor reports


The interim report into the shutdown of the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) IT system last August bank holiday has attributed the scale of the disruption to engineers working from home. The panel commissioned by the


CAA to examine the failure, which led to flight cancellations or delays affecting 700,000 passengers, reported the problem proved “more protracted than it might otherwise have been” due to senior engineers not being available on site over the bank holiday. It also noted a failure “to rehearse” for such an incident. The ‘progress


56 21 MARCH 2024


report’ published last week found it took an engineer 90 minutes to arrive on site, the most senior engineer on duty was not called for more than three hours and Nats waited four hours to call the software supplier for help. The issue arose when Nats’


systems could not process a flight plan for a Los Angeles to Paris service that included identical abbreviations for two ‘waypoints’ on its route – Deauville in France and Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, both designated DVL. Both Nats’ primary and secondary


systems shut down as designed to do to prevent transfer of the ‘corrupt’


data. But the problem flight plan remained in the queue for processing so each time the systems were restarted they shut down again. This cycle only ended “with the assistance of [the] system supplier four hours after the event”. The Airlines UK association


declared the report “damning evidence that Nats’ basic resilience planning and procedures were wholly inadequate”. However, the report also highlights poor treatment of passengers by


Continued on page 54 travelweekly.co.uk


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