Investigations Reveal that the Bug in the System was Responsible for Grounding Planes in Heathrow.

Jul 21
20:50

2015

Stephen Godden

Stephen Godden

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Last year, the computer systems of the United Kingdom’s primary air traffic control centre had an unknown failure that grounded and diverted majority of the flights that were destined for and departed from London’s Heathrow Airport.

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The European flight news confirmed that on primary diagnosis,Investigations Reveal that the Bug in the System was Responsible for Grounding Planes in Heathrow. Articles the failure of National Air Traffic System’s (NATS) due to power outrage was ruled out. Air capacity, however, was restricted to manage the situation. In an earlier statement reported by flight delay news EU, NATS confirmed that the closure of U.K airspace did not appear to be the result of a security threat to the U.K.

Heathrow is the U.K.’s busiest airport and also the busiest passenger traffic in Europe. The airport sees an average of 1,286 flights every day.  EU airlines news reported that when the system shut down, 66 flights were cancelled affecting thousands of passengers. At least 14 airports were affected by Heathrow’s delay. The number increased further as NATS tried to return to full capacity. Followed by a technical glitch at Swanwick, a sister facility to the organization’s other location in Prestwick, Scotland, all the operations across UK came to a standstill. Swanwick controls the 200,000 square miles of airspace above England and Wales employing 1,300 controllers. The facility has been a frequent target to repeated trouble with radio communications and internal telephone system issues.

The glitch that caused delays at Heathrow and Gatwick had knock-on effects on other U.K. airports. According to flight delay news, 84 out of 1,300 flights were cancelled at Heathrow and delays extended to over an hour. All flights to London City were cancelled. Newcastle, Luton, Bristol, Edinburgh, East Midlands and Manchester flights were delayed. The flights to Birmingham were re-routed to avoid flying through London airspace.

According to the E.U flight compensation laws, the stranded passengers are entitled to apply for compensation if the flight delays aren’t caused by ‘extraordinary circumstances’. People delayed over-night were put up in a large number of hotel rooms. Under EU rules, passengers delayed for over three hours are eligible to claim flight delay compensation based on the distance to the intended destination.

After thorough investigation, experts said that the cause of the widespread system failure was caused by a glitch in the new upgraded software. The delay was caused because the controllers lost the support of their computer-based tools. Without the tools, the controllers couldn’t handle many simultaneous aircrafts affecting the upper airspace sector.

The controllers could have still contained the situation by radio systems, but adhering to strict safety regulation policy of NATS, the sky was cleared first by grounding all flights. If it were a power supply problem, it could have been rectified with a simple push of the back-up power generator. In recent news, a software problem in the Electronic Control Units (ECU) led to a crash, killing the four member team on board. These repeated events caused by software glitches highlights how reliant the airline industry has become on technologies which can fail too!

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