Why does air traffic control keep failing?

0:12Yet another air traffic control failure has left passengers stranded and airlines demanding answers. This is why.

0:23Another summer, another air traffic control meltdown. Passengers just want to get home. Ryanair wants someone sacked. Mark Roth has presided over a litany of IT failures in the UK. And yesterday, thousands of flights across the UK were cancelled. Huge disruption to passengers. all because Nat does not have a functioning backup system for when these types of events happen. We think the answers he's given so far have been insufficient and the resilience is not enough and it's time for him to go. Now that's Ryanair's Chief Operating Officer, no less, taking aim at the boss of Nat, the UK's National Air Traffic Control Service Provider.

1:03For passengers, though, there are more immediate problems. Hi Neil, myself and my husband are currently stuck in Crete after having our British Airways flight to Heathrow Council yesterday Everybody was there waiting to get on the plane They're waiting to hear from the captain about whether we're flying or not and mention something about weather, which obviously was a bit strange because we didn't think the weather was too bad back in London A lot of people have seen online that there were issues with air traffic control The gate area getting busier and busier about 8pm. They confirmed our flight had been cancelled and we had to find our own way back to wherever we were going to stay.

1:42We have since had an email from British Airways saying that they will cover reasonable costs, but we don't know what's happening today. We're just a bit in limbo. Gemma, I hope you guys get home very soon indeed. Well look, at the time of recording, we still don't know the precise details of what went wrong, beyond it being a problem with the flight processing system. So today, we're going to take you inside the UK's air traffic control. What happens when things go wrong? Why can't a backup keep us moving? And why does this keep happening? Doug McLean is an aviation and air traffic control expert who himself spent decades working at Nats.

2:27Doug, look, we have all seen the pictures of thousands upon thousands of people being stranded. What do we actually know about what went wrong, beyond the fact it's apparently to do with a flight processing system and that it definitely wasn't a cyber attack? Yes. Well, I suppose that not a cyber attack in the present circumstances is important to put in just now. I would not have expected that because cyber security is something that all major companies, and certainly a company like Nats, has taken seriously for decades. So that has been thankfully ruled out very clearly. We are talking about a failure of the flight data processing system.

3:09I have huge respect for Nats. They are a genuinely world-class organisation. I don't think that their approach to public relations at the moment and during these sort of crises is adequate. The flight data processing system, everything is data. Everything is digitised. So a data failure could be almost anything in an organisation like NATS. And a criticism I have at the moment is that they have not made it clear what data system has failed and where it failed. The UK has two air traffic control centres. One is at Swanwick near Southampton. The other one is at Prestwick in Ayrshire. They divide up the airspace between them.

3:58So it leads people like myself in trying to inform the public, scratching around to gather whatever information that we can to say this is where the failure is and this is what you can expect. But clearly it has been a significant failure. In fact, more than that, this is the sort of thing that if you're working in air traffic control, you never want to see. The public would never have been in any danger. The staff would never have been panicking in the sense that, oh my God, what is happening? We've lost all the picture. We can't see anything. We can't speak to anything. The reason that air traffic control stop all departures is pretty simple.

4:39Your airplanes come into the system by getting airborne. Stop the airplanes getting airborne from as many airports as you control. you then stop airplanes adding to the complexity of what's going on. Airplanes can then be allowed to land and hopefully when that has taken place there's an investigation which has gone on the problem has been identified and a fix has been put in to sort it. I wonder if we might just take a step back for a second because I'm not entirely certain I know what Nats is and what it does. Can we just be really, really simple about it? What is Nats? OK, well, Nats came from the National Air Traffic Services originally.

5:27It is now Nats Limited or Nats PLC. It is now a private company. It was privatised about 25 years ago. It's the only major air traffic control, national air traffic control system in the world, which is privatised. The Canadians have a different version. They have a semi-privatised, I would say, organisation, but we're very different. That in itself is not a problem. The privatisation that was done, it gave the government a certain amount of control, it gave the staff a certain amount of control, it gave the airlines a certain amount of control and it gave investors a certain amount of control.

6:07So in many ways, privatisation has actually been a good thing for Nats. Some would argue not, but I think as a former trade union representative who was against it in the first place, I would hold my hand up and say it's actually turned out to be a good thing because they've got the investment and they are now able to work in all sorts of parts of the world and contract air traffic control services. So I guess you've got to ask, what is air traffic control? What does it do? let's take the simple part on the ground the airplane has a request to fly let's go from Glasgow to Heathrow nice simple flight the pilot calls up on the ground frequency speaks to the ground controller who gives the airplane its clearance the airplane taxis out gets towards the runway it's handed over to the tower controller at that point who is in control of the runway landings and take off and the airplane is cleared for takeoff and sets off on its way down to London.

7:11So as soon as the airplanes are airborne, they will be transferred to the air traffic control centre. They control very large pieces of airspace. So the airplane will pass through a number of sectors as it's climbing up to its cruising level, the flight plan of the airplane, and the data is sent ahead of the airplane to the sectors and to the centers where the airplane will operate so that everybody is aware of what's coming. It will also give live updates. So there's no point in a controller who's sitting at Heathrow expecting an airplane at 4 o 'clock when actually it's taken off 20 minutes late.

7:55Right. So it's a live system. It keeps updating as it goes along.

8:30The End can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees, may apply. I'm Sam Coates. And I'm Andy Cowboy. Britain has a new Prime Minister and every day from 7.45am we'll help you make sense of the day ahead in just 20 minutes. That means taking you inside Westminster with our forensic insight, sharp analysis and the stories behind the headlines. From the battles in Parliament to the conversations shaping government. We'll set you up each morning for the day ahead in British politics. Hit follow and listen to Politics at Sam and Anne's wherever you get your podcasts.

9:15I've always had this image of these control centres being, you know, darkened rooms, people huddled over what looks like one of those kind of radar screens from, you know, 80s blockbuster movie pinging and things appearing there. Obviously, I will be inaccurate about that, but I've always imagined it to be quite a camera atmosphere. What happens in that control room when the data that you are supposed to see on that screen disappears, when we have an incident like this? What's the atmosphere like at that point? You're right. The Air Traffic Control Centre, it is no longer the darkened room of the 1970s, 1980s.

9:50We work in modern, bright daylight rooms in the case of the Presswick Centre, which is the most modern building that Nats has. It is calm, it is quiet. If you walk around the air traffic control centre, you will see people working, you will hear them talking, you will not normally hear raised voices. Controllers and pilots work in a very similar way, that although it can be a very stressful position, they're all highly trained, they're all experienced, and they are trained even in emergencies if things start to go wrong. One thing that alerted me to this yesterday was I happened to be looking at an equivalent of flight radar 24 and I saw an airplane coming off Edinburgh going to Greece, which went up to the north, went towards Aberdeen and then turned out towards the North Sea and then flew down the North Sea.

10:49And I thought, hmm, very, very interesting. At the same time, I was watching a Turkish aeroplane which was coming up the North Sea, further out than I would normally have expected. And I began to think, what is going on? And what was actually happening there was that the flow management system, which is connected worldwide through the flow management centre in Brussels, would immediately, when they knew that the data had failed, they would immediately put a flow control rate on, which stopped all the departures and may have reduced the capacity of some of the sectors by about a 50%, something like that, to say, whoa, let's calm this all down.

11:33No more aeroplanes. That suggests to me that those who wonder why a backup system doesn't just immediately kick in when there is a failure of this type are misguided? Is it just a case that there isn't a backup that works like that? So there would be an automatic backup on this. If there was a hardware failure or something happened unusual to the live system, then it shuts down and the backup system immediately kicks in. The staff would hardly even notice that it happened. Now, to have the sort of incident that we had yesterday seems to indicate that both systems had failed. And that was similar to what happened three years ago.

12:18There was a major failure over the August Bank holiday weekend. And we had a similar situation with tens of thousands of people being delayed. But as you say, we had that failure at the August Bank holiday weekend. We also had major disruption back in 2023 as well. So that's 2023, 2025, 2026. And I've seen the Civil Aviation Authority's reports, you know, lessons according to them have been learned. What has actually improved as a result of the two outages that we saw previously? I think that's the question that Heidi Alexander may well be asking of the Nats chief executive at the moment. What lessons did you learn and why do we seem to have another failure?

12:59Now, they will not be the same failure. They will not have the same cause, but it's the same system. It's a bit unfortunate, but flight data processing is simply all of the data that Nats handles and the whole system depends on data. So to say flight data processing system has failed, it could be anything. It could be anything in any part of the system, but it was enough yesterday for the air traffic control system to stop all departures and reduced the number of inbounds coming into the UK. So it was taken very, very seriously as soon as it happened. But we do keep finding ourselves in this situation.

13:42We've heard from Ryanair that they feel that the blame stops at the very top of Nats. What is your view on that? It's difficult to know what this failure is. Nobody's against Nats. Nobody's arguing that they're a terrible organisation and that they should lose their license to do their job, etc. They are a very, very good organization. But you still have these failures. And that is something that there has to be an accountability somewhere in that that says, why are we having these failures, which in the end impact the members of the public as badly as they did yesterday and today and probably for days afterwards?

14:27and you can understand the anger not just of course of the passengers but of those of those airline bosses you know the budget airlines are operating at slim margins to start with aviation fuel is is through the roof and in short supply i mean this is the last thing they need so i wonder with your professional experience what needs to happen to get to grips with the problems that are happening at Nats. I can't recall a period when the chief executive or the chairman or whoever has been called to see the minister the same day, which indicates that, quite rightly, that the government are taking this very seriously.

15:07And Nats themselves will be taking this incredibly seriously. They do not want the name to be in the public at all. The idea would be that you don't even know who they are or where they are. So this really strikes home to everything that Nats stands for. It will be up to this government and be very interesting to see how the attitude of this government with the apparently repeated failures of Nats to provide the service that it's contracted to do. Put this into context for us if you can, Doug. I mean, how often does this happen elsewhere? Should we be expecting air traffic control to fall over from time to time?

15:49No, I don't think we should. We don't have 100 airplanes getting airborne and that will be okay, 99 of them will land safely. It doesn't work that way. It is a professional safety organization which has very, very high standards. But I can't recall failures in air traffic control centers which have happened so often, you've got to get it right. And that's the business that Nats is in. And they know that. Doug, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much for your time.

16:25And that's a lot for today. But of course, we are always in the market for your thoughts. We did a podcast Monday about the growing professionalism of the anti-migrant protests. Emily got in touch to say this. One key question that doesn't seem to be getting asked is, who is funding them? Where are they getting the ideas from? Given everything that we're learning about foreign sources of funding for reform, and given Elon Musk's and other key figures on the American rights seeming hankering for a British civil war, shouldn't we really get to the bottom of who is funding and possibly even directing these protests?

16:55At Goodpoint Emily, do let us know your thoughts on today. And Gemma, if you are listening, let us know you got home safe. Why at Sky.uk is the email. Like a stranded passenger, we're back tomorrow.

17:11I'm Sam Coates. And I'm Anne McElvoy. Britain has a new Prime Minister and every day from 7.45am we'll help you make sense to the day ahead in just 20 minutes. That means taking you inside Westminster with our forensic insight, sharp analysis and the stories behind the headlines. From the battles in Parliament to the conversations shaping government. We'll set you up each morning for the day ahead in British politics. Hit follow and listen to Politics at Sam & Anne's wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.