Problems with a routine overnight software upgrade at the Swanwick
air traffic control centre left controllers staring at blank
screens and led to long delays and flight cancellations at most
British airports this morning.
National Air Traffic Services (Nats), which runs the Swanwick
centre in Hampshire, was able to devise a work round to restore
full capacity to the system at 11am, but a Nats representative said
the source of the problem was not known. "An investigation is still
continuing," he said.
Nats ran into problems when it tried to return systems from their
night-time configuration, where a single controller manages a
series of linked air space sectors, to the daytime configuration
where a single controller manages each sector.
The air traffic body then cut the number of flights it was handling
by half. At no time, Nats insisted, was passenger safety
compromised by the failure.
Nats' systems have suffered three failures in the past two months
that have led to flight delays and cancellations, but a spokesman
told CW360.com, "Today's problems were the first failure particular
to Swanwick."
Previous failures were caused when faulty data was fed into the
Flight Data Processing System at West Drayton in Middlesex, near
Heathrow. This triggered "multiple aborts" that eventually led to
an automated shutdown of IBM S/390 mainframes.