![]() It went offline at 8.32am but holds four hours’ worth of data. The Times understands that the offending flight plan was filed by a low-cost French airline operating a transatlantic flight, although Rolfe was keen to stress the issues were not the fault of the airline or Eurocontrol.Īirline bosses remain furious that the system was able to fail and for such a long period. Nats was previously called National Air Traffic Services. “If there is evidence to suggest Nats may have breached its statutory and licensing obligations, we will consider whether any further action is necessary.” The initial report by Nats raises several important questions and as the regulator we want to make sure these are answered for passengers and industry. Rob Bishton, joint interim CAA chief executive, said: “Millions of passengers every year rely on air traffic control to work smoothly and safely. A full independent and wide-ranging review of Nats is needed to ensure it is fit for purpose today and in the future and so we welcome the CAA’s planned review.” The organisation added: “It is vital lessons have been learned so passengers never see a repeat of an incident on this scale. Nats said its report confirmed that the failure did not present any danger and that it had now found a fix to prevent it happening again. The CAA said today that it would carry out a full independent review of the events. The interim report has been passed to the CAA and to Mark Harper, the transport secretary. “We’ve had 15 million flight plans pass through the system and we can be absolutely certain that we’ve never seen this set of circumstances before,” Rolfe said. As there is no requirement for a flight plan to contain an exit waypoint from a Flight Information Region or a country’s airspace, the software is designed to cope with this scenario.” This did not appear in that section of the flight plan so the search was unsuccessful. “Next, it searches backwards, from the end of that section, to find the UK airspace exit point. “This was successfully found,” the report said. Once a flight plan is received, Nats computers decode it and focus on the section that is relevant to British airspace, starting by searching from the beginning of the data to find the UK airspace entry point. It was delivered correctly into Nats’s system from Eurocontrol, the European airspace manager, but would corrupt the system because of the erroneous waypoint. The report said that the “plan included two waypoints along its route that were geographically distinct but which have the same designator”. The problems began when a flight plan was received at the Nats headquarters in Swanwick, Hampshire, containing duplicate waypoints - five-letter capitalised words that are used to navigate aircraft - that made the system believe the plane would leave UK airspace prior to entering it. ![]()
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