Air traffic control boss has one week to deliver investigation into glitch, No 10 says, as UK flight cancellations top 2,000 – as it happened
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander told MPs she did not believe the air traffic control problems that have caused chaos for passengers were “unavoidable” and said she had asked the Civil Aviation Authority to conduct an independent review.
double quotation mark A four-hour air traffic outage yesterday left hundreds of thousands of passengers facing cancellations, diversions and delays. I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to passengers for this disruption.
We often take for granted the way in which our aviation system just works, but yesterday that was not the case. Safety must remain air traffic controllers’ overriding priority and this morning I have spoken to Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe, who informed me this outage was due to a technical issue at their Swanwick site.
So, while my understanding from Nats is that we can rule out a cyber attack on this occasion, I do not believe this issue was unavoidable.
double quotation mark We also spoke this morning about how Nats responded to resolve and minimise the disruption as quickly as possible, and I am grateful to the airports and airlines who responded straight away.
But I am clear that passengers should not have to face this disruption. I have therefore asked the CAA to conduct an independent review to establish cause and ensure that our air traffic control systems can get passengers to where they need to be and this … review will report to me within six months.
Source: The Guardian. Summary reproduced for informational purposes.
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