‘Unusual piece of data' caused flight chaos, air traffic control boss says

The air traffic control chaos was caused by an ‘unusual piece of data’ according to an air traffic control (ATC) boss. On Monday (August 28) the error led to widespread flight disruption with many UK holidaymakers left stranded overseas after around 2,000 flights were cancelled.

Airlines are under growing pressure over their treatment of passengers as thousands of holidaymakers had to find last-minute accommodation and alternative flights. Delays and cancellations continued on Tuesday as the issue had a knock on effect to other services.

There is speculation the ATC failure was caused by a French airline submitting a flight plan to National Air Traffic Services (Nats) in the wrong format. This has not been ruled out by Downing Street, although Nats declined to comment on whether that was what happened.

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On Monday, flights to and from UK airports were restricted for several hours as the fault prevented flight plans from being processed automatically, meaning manual checks were required.

Nats chief executive, Martin Rolfe, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It wasn’t an entire system failure. It was a piece of the system, an important piece of the system. But in those circumstances, if we receive an unusual piece of data that we don’t recognise, it is critically important that that information – which could be erroneous – is not passed to air traffic controllers.”

Mr Rolfe said Nats has “safety-critical systems” and “throwing data away needs to be very carefully considered”.

Willie Walsh, director-general of global airline body the International Air Transport Association (Iata) and former British Airways boss, described