Summary
- A flight plan filed by French bee caused a UK ATC outage, impacting 700,000 passengers in August 2023.
- The 2 systems’ failures resulted in them being disconnected inside seconds.
- Stakeholders complained of slow communication by NERL during outage, impacting airlines, airports, and passengers in UK airspace.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has published its preliminary report on the air traffic control (ATC) system outage over the country’s airspace in August 2023. Based on the authority, a single French bee flight plan caused the failure, impacting tons of of flights and tons of of 1000’s of passengers.
Impacting 700,000 passengers
The CAA issued its report on March 14, detailing that when NATS, the corporate that gives ATC services within the UK, suffered its systems failure, over 700,00 passengers were affected by the outage. The panel provided its preliminary conclusions, having begun the investigatory work in October 2023.
Photo: French bee
Based on the authority, the NATS flight planning system, often known as NERL, failed when French bee filed its flight plan data for a particular service from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Paris-Orly Airport (ORY). The flight’s planned route included overflights over American, Canadian, Oceanic, British, and French airspace before finally landing at ORY. It will be significant to notice that NERL is an economically regulated NATS business that also provides ATC services outside the UK. As such, NERL is the de facto service provider for ATC for the country and its airspace.
![French bee Airbus A350](https://static1.simpleflyingimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/shutterstock_2418111189-1.jpg)
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Two systems’ failure
The report detailed that after the airline filed its flight plan, the first and secondary systems produced critical exception errors, causing each system to enter maintenance mode. Because of this, this prevented the transfer of apparently corrupt flight plan data to ATC.
Photo:Â EQRoy | Shutterstock
Nevertheless, the report noted that French bee filed the plan in accordance with standard procedures, forwarding the plan to EUROCONTROL for processing. Subsequently, the flight plan data was converted to a European standard, ATS Data Exchange Presentation (ADEXP), adding supplementary waypoints, identifying states requiring flight information, and sharing the ADEXP-formatted file with those states.
Essentially, the flight plan data was then passed to NATS, namely to the FPRSA-R at Swanwick Area Control Centre (ACC). In a typical scenario, the ADEXP data is processed and further identifies the portion of the route flown within the country’s airspace, presenting that data to ATC.
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Mixing up North Dakota and France
The FPRSA-R, acting as the first system, began trying to find the entry point into the UK’s airspace. After identifying APSOV as a viable entry point, the system sought an exit waypoint, identifying two possibilities. Nevertheless, since each (SITET and ETRAT) weren’t a part of the unique flight plan, they were dismissed, with the system choosing the third option: Deauville, which had the three-letter abbreviation of DVL.
Nevertheless, the DVL that French bee included in its original flight plan was in North Dakota, namely Devil’s Lake. Because of this, FPRSA-R considered the exit waypoint unviable, generating a critical exception error and disconnecting it from the system, because it was designed to do.
The secondary system received the identical flight plan and was undergoing the identical process when it, too, generated a critical exception error and disconnected. Devils Lake Regional Airport (DVL) and Saint-Gatien Airport (DOL) are shown below, highlighting the large distance between the 2 waypoints.
Photo: Great Circle Mapper
The panel highlighted that after the first system received the flight plan, each FPRSA-R systems shut down inside 20 seconds. Because of this, NATS couldn’t routinely process flight plan data, forcing controllers to achieve this manually.
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Stakeholders’ complaints
The panel’s report also noted that after speaking with many stakeholders, including airports, airlines, consumer organizations, and others, many expressed dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of NERL’s communication.
One among the primary issues expressed by the stakeholders was how slow NERL was in warning in regards to the problem and describing it intimately. Because of this, airlines and airports experienced more uncertainty, exacerbating the impact on passengers. The panel detailed that 300,000 passengers’ flights were canceled, while around 95,000 and 300,000 travelers suffered long and shorter delays, respectively.
Photo: Ryanair
For instance, Irish low-cost carrier Ryanair was highly critical of NATS after the failure and the corporate’s preliminary report, issued in September 2023. Ryanair’s chief executive officer (CEO), Michael O’Leary, alleged that NATS had made a lot of false claims in its preliminary report.
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Moving forward following the systems’ failure
Moving toward the conclusion, the report stated that, compared with other European ATC providers, NATS has performed well when it comes to average Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) delays. Nevertheless, its two separate system failures in 2013 and 2023 highlighted the necessity to introduce incentives that ensure efficiency and address resilience-related problems.
Still, the panel highlighted that it was inappropriate that despite achieving all of its performance targets in 2023, NERL will suffer only a few financial consequences following the systems’ failure. As such, the report noted that using a performance incentive-based framework will not be measuring the best things.
Photo: NATS
In conclusion, while the panel has only presented its preliminary findings, it also said it could make recommendations to repair various issues. These include the cause and management of the failure, resilience planning, systematic communication improvements, regulatory powers to hunt information, a framework for consumer engagement and representation, and dispute resolution.
![Pier 3 London Gatwick Airport aerial view](https://static1.simpleflyingimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/airport-facilities-and-infrastructure-pier-3-london-gatwick-airport-aerial-view-jmilstein-jpg.jpg)
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