Air Traffic Control. No margin for a bad afternoon.
Britain more or less stopped taking off yesterday. About 1,300 flights were cancelled, and there was nothing wrong with a single aeroplane, runway or sky.
THE GIST ON AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL: "Flights Grounded in Britain"
What happened?
Yesterday afternoon, Britain more or less stopped taking off. Planes sat on taxiways at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Edinburgh. Around 1,300 flights were cancelled and another 177 today. There was nothing wrong with a single aeroplane, runway or the sky.
At 12:48, a system went down at NATS, the company that runs British airspace. It's the flight processing system that takes flight plans and turns them into something a controller can work from. The airspace stayed open the whole time, but without the computer doing that automatically, controllers can only safely handle so many flights at once.
Why is Heathrow so exposed?
Heathrow has two runways. Schiphol has six, Paris has four and so does Frankfurt. Heathrow carries more than all of them and runs at almost full capacity. There is simply no margin for error and no room to reschedule. Every minute is spoken for.
Has this happened before?
As we know, this is a regular occurrence. Three years ago, the flight plan system failed and cost the airlines £100 million. Last year another fault stopped everything for four hours. The chief executive was on Sky last night saying he still didn't know what went wrong.
Why is there no slack?
The spare capacity always looks like waste. The empty runway, the spare bed, the hour in your diary with nothing booked in. So you crank it up to 11, because no one's been thanked for a disaster that didn't happen.
Then a surprise turns up. That's what Heathrow is: what a system looks like when it's been run at full capacity for 30 years. It works fantastically, right up until a computer has a bad afternoon.
Should airports keep spare capacity, even if it costs?
Your take. One tap, then see how everyone else voted.
Quick answers
What went wrong at NATS?
At 12:48 the flight processing system, which turns flight plans into something controllers can work from, went down. Airspace stayed open but controllers could only safely handle so many flights.
Why is Heathrow so vulnerable?
It has two runways against Schiphol's six and Paris's and Frankfurt's four, yet carries more than all of them, so there is no margin to reschedule.
Has it happened before?
Three years ago a flight plan system failure cost airlines £100 million, and last year another fault stopped everything for four hours.
See you on the next one.
What should the next one be? Suggest a topic for Huw to explain
The conversation
Comments
Nothing here yet. Start the conversation: Huw reads every comment before it is published.
