UK Air Travel Will Be Disrupted for 'Some Days' After Traffic Control Glitch (nytimes.com) 16
Flights in and out of Britain will be disrupted for days, the U.K. government said on Tuesday, after a technical issue with the country's air traffic control system left thousands of passengers stranded abroad or facing severe delays. From a report: Around 280 flights were canceled on Tuesday, about 5 percent of the total scheduled to leave or arrive in Britain, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company, compounding travel woes for British holidaymakers after more than a thousand flights were canceled the day before. The trouble came at a particularly busy time for travelers in Britain, many of whom were returning home from summer vacation or long weekends because Monday was a public holiday in the country.
"The timing was not at all helpful for people," Mark Harper, the government minister responsible for transport policy, told the BBC on Tuesday morning. "It's disrupted thousands of people. Lots of flights were canceled yesterday because of the imperative to keep the system working safely, and it is going to take some days to get completely everybody back to where they should be." He added that the government's technical experts had concluded that the episode was not a cyberattack. Britain's National Air Traffic Service, which runs air traffic control, said on Monday that a failure of the automatic system that processes plane routes meant that, for several hours, flight plans had to be entered manually.
"The timing was not at all helpful for people," Mark Harper, the government minister responsible for transport policy, told the BBC on Tuesday morning. "It's disrupted thousands of people. Lots of flights were canceled yesterday because of the imperative to keep the system working safely, and it is going to take some days to get completely everybody back to where they should be." He added that the government's technical experts had concluded that the episode was not a cyberattack. Britain's National Air Traffic Service, which runs air traffic control, said on Monday that a failure of the automatic system that processes plane routes meant that, for several hours, flight plans had to be entered manually.
What are they running? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wonder what the system uses? At one time it was all handled on IBM iron. Want to bet they switched to "the cloud" because it's all the rage?
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Wonder what the system uses? At one time it was all handled on IBM iron. Want to bet they switched to "the cloud" because it's all the rage?
Apparently their Babbage Difference Engine threw a rod.
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Might as well pay a spiritual medium too, to "intercede" with the cloud companies.
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Wonder what the system uses? At one time it was all handled on IBM iron. Want to bet they switched to "the cloud" because it's all the rage?
It wouldn't surprise me if they were running an ancient system, however the cause of this was input. One of the inputs caused an error and the system shut down, forcing a fall back to manual processing to prevent the system from sending out false or misleading data. Basically it failed like it was supposed to, it was a freak event and now they know what input to sterilise next time.
The system was back up within hours. However due to the nature of European air travel being a race to the bottom and everyon
Classic English Understatement (Score:3)
The timing was not at all helpful for people
That's some classic English understatement right there.
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-Silver lining
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You know that "aviation" accounts for a whopping 1.9% of man-made CO2 emissions, right?
https://ourworldindata.org/emi... [ourworldindata.org]
Re: Classic English Understatement (Score:3)
That's 1.9% emissions caused by "about 6 percent of the world's population flying somewhere and back at least once" in a given year.
https://www.quora.com/What-per... [quora.com]
As for the parent's "lots of flights saved," I'm so sure. Disruptions like this cause lots of repositioning flights, detours and what not.
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Eurostar is putting on extra train services, so at least some of those passengers are expected to opt for rail travel instead.
By the time they are put on a different aircraft, high speed rail may well be faster.
Under EU rules, still in UK law, the passengers can claim back the cost of alternative travel too.
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Eurostar is putting on extra train services, so at least some of those passengers are expected to opt for rail travel instead.
By the time they are put on a different aircraft, high speed rail may well be faster.
Under EU rules, still in UK law, the passengers can claim back the cost of alternative travel too.
Problem is that last minute Eurostar tickets are eye watering. Also that only goes between London and Paris or Amsterdam with a few stops along the way like Lille or Brussels. Not really helpful if you're trying to get from Madrid to London or Edinburgh to Paris, let alone Athens to Belfast. so even if you adsorb the cost, you're still not going to make it on time (London to Barcelona is 10 hours by train with two changes which is a change of station in Paris, admittedly the metro gets you there in 10 mins)
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The timing was not at all helpful for people
That's some classic English understatement right there.
So is "Keep calm and stand in the queue."
This is an easy one... (Score:2)
Flights in and out of Britain will be disrupted for days, the U.K. government said
This tends to happen whenever British Airways gets involved.
Description of the root cause from BBC (Score:2)
The chaos endured by thousands of UK travellers was a result of the [National Air Traffic Service] (Nats) receiving data that it could not process, leading to part of its system failing.
Nats controls most aircraft in UK airspace and receives millions of flight plans every year. Due to the failure, Nats reverted to a manual system - meaning fewer flights could be handled, causing a huge backlog.
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Most of the continuing disruption is however consequent on planes (and/ or crew, and/or parts for PPM) not being in the right place now, and some transition needed to come back to scheduled service.