A software defect in part of the UK’s air traffic control system corrupted flight data “in the space of a millisecond”, leading to a six-hour outage and mass airline cancellations and delays across the UK last week, National Air Traffic Services has said.
Hundreds of thousands of passengers had their travel disrupted after the Nats failure on Tuesday 8 September, which at first only stopped flights leaving in the London area but eventually spread to disrupt travel across the UK and beyond by the evening.
The preliminary report said that the failure was a software defect in part of the National Airspace System, which allocates codes to individual aircraft to identify flights on radar.
3 sentences from our version of the report,
chosen to cover it. Nothing here is written; every line is in the article below.
How
Summarized version
Hundreds of thousands of passengers had their travel disrupted after the Nats failure on Tuesday 8 September.
The report’s most important sentence, shortened and in plain words. How
Headline check
Headline as published: Flight chaos for hundreds of thousands was caused in ‘millisecond’ by software error
The one thing this headline claims is in the report.
Figures, names and quoted words in the headline, looked for in the report itself — not in the summary above. One claim in this headline could be checked, so this is a narrow pass and not a thorough one. How this is checked
The article, shortened and in plain language
UK ministers say report into incident leaves questions unanswered over why problem was not discovered and fixed earlier.
A software defect in part of the UK’s air traffic control system corrupted flight data “in the space of a millisecond”, leading to a six-hour outage and mass airline cancellations and delays across the UK last week, National Air Traffic Services has said.
The transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, said the industry regulator the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) would now “check their findings” and investigate Nats’ plans.
Hundreds of thousands of passengers had their travel disrupted after the Nats failure on Tuesday 8 September, which at first only stopped flights leaving in the London area but eventually spread to disrupt travel across the UK and beyond by the evening.
Airlines called for the dismissal of the Nats chief executive officer, Martin Rolfe, after the third air traffic control failure in the UK since summer 2023.
Rolfe said the incident was unrelated to the previous failures and dismissed speculation that it was caused by military intervention.
The preliminary report said that the failure was a software defect in part of the National Airspace System, which allocates codes to individual aircraft to identify flights on radar.
The restrictions were in place for six hours and it took more than two days for the backlog of passenger disruption to be cleared, with hundreds of thousands of passengers’ travel plans disrupted.
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