UK's worst air-traffic outage caused by anomaly in airspace manager’s software system: Report

livemint.com:

Bloomberg on 6 September. On Wednesday, the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority said it will conduct an independent review of the incident, which forced hundreds of flights to be canceled or delayed last week after an error in processing an airline’s flight plan. According to a preliminary report from the public-private partnership formerly called National Air Traffic Service, the glitch triggered a shutdown of the software system run by NATS for safety reasons.

Due to this, air traffic staff to input flight plans manually, drastically reducing the amount of air traffic that could be processed. On 28 August, the event sent airlines and airports in the UK into turmoil, leaving planes out of position and passengers stranded. As per details by analytics firm Cirium, about 800 flights leaving UK airports were canceled, with a similar number of arrivals scrapped.

NATS report showed on the day of the incident, an airline entered a plan into the system which led through UK airspace. NATS Chief Executive Officer Martin Rolfe declined to discuss details of the flight, such as its route or the airline involved, saying the specifics weren’t pertinent to the outage. As per Rolfe, although the flight plan wasn’t faulty, it threw off the system because the software used by NATS received duplicate identities for two different points on the map.

There are an infinite number of flight-plan waypoints in the world, and duplicates remain despite work to remove them. In this case, the NATS system correctly identified the point at which the plane was to cross into the UK. However, the exit point had a duplicate name that matched a different spot on the map some 4,000 nautical miles away.