- Written by Katie Austin & Tom Espiner
- Transportation correspondent and reporter
Rory Dollard’s family was stranded in France last summer after their flight was canceled.
Air traffic disruptions during last August’s public holidays were made worse by on-call engineers being unable to resolve the issue from home, the report said.
More than 700,000 passengers were affected by the air traffic meltdown, with ripple effects lasting several days.
Industry body British Airways said a report compiled for the Civil Aviation Authority showed air traffic control processes were “completely inadequate”.
Air traffic provider NATS said it had made “improvements” since last summer.
The airline said the delays had cost it tens of millions of pounds.
On August 28 last year, a public holiday Monday, NATS experienced a major technical failure, causing widespread operational disruption and stranding thousands of passengers.
An independent interim report commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority to investigate what went wrong found that the problems started when the NATS system struggled to cope with an abnormal flight plan and went down. found.
Backup systems also went down, leaving manual processing of flight plans the only option.
The NATS engineer working in the field was unable to resolve the issue, so the issue was escalated up the chain to the on-call engineer.
It took one of our senior engineers an hour and a half to access the NATS site and attempt to restart the system, which was not possible remotely.
The specialist technician arrived at the scene more than three hours after the incident occurred.
He then sought help from another engineer, and four hours later, the flight plan data that had been saved was gone, so the system manufacturer, Frequentis, was notified.
The system was down for nearly 6 hours and 35 minutes.
The report said the incident, which resulted in mass cancellations on Monday’s bank holiday, had a “substantial financial and psychological impact” on around 450,000 of the 250,000 passengers on board.
This includes 300,000 people affected by flight cancellations, 95,000 people affected by long delays of three hours or more, and 300,000 people affected by even shorter delays.
Watch: The day Britain’s air traffic control went down…Watch in 71 seconds
The report says improved resilience planning is needed to prevent similar meltdowns in the future.
Even though this is “best practice” and common in other areas, it appears that there was no rehearsal of how to deal with such incidents.
The report describes a “significant lack of proactive planning and coordination” between various sectors of the industry in response to unusual “significant events or incidents.”
It also outlined how airlines and airports had raised concerns about late warnings of problems and “limited explanations” during the event.
For example, regional and city airports learned of the problem on BBC News, but were not contacted by NATS that day.
The report said communication problems “unnecessarily increased uncertainty and had a serious impact on passengers and others.”
He said some airlines had given passengers “misinformation” about their rights and told them they needed to make plans to return home.
An example was cited of a passenger and his child stranded abroad being given a leaflet telling them to make their own arrangements and request a refund.
It wasn’t until four or five days later that I was able to find the plane. The airline said it would issue refunds only for one-night stays. It cost 900 pounds.
However, there were some good examples where individuals were provided with all the appropriate support.
The committee said so many people were stranded at the same time during the busy bank holiday, and the scale of the disruption made it even harder to provide care and support.
Airports, restaurants, hotels, and most importantly, alternative flights quickly filled up.
Airlines often made “significant efforts” to accommodate customers, but found that “incomplete or inaccurate information was provided about passenger rights,” meal vouchers were not accepted, or There were also incidents in which adequate hotel accommodation was not provided.
Tim Alderslade, chief executive of UK Airways, said the interim report said: “NATS’s basic resilience plans and procedures are completely inadequate and as expected of such critical national infrastructure. “It contains appalling evidence that the standards were far below what they should be.”
He added that further investigation would lead to recommendations in the final report to “prevent this type of catastrophic failure from happening again.”
NATS said it had “fully cooperated” with the investigation.
“We did not wait for the commission’s report to learn from last year’s experience and improve our response to future events,” the air traffic provider said.
“This includes a review of our work with airline customers, extensive crisis response, and engineering support processes.”
