The NATS chief executive apologises for the chaos which ensued after the UK’s air traffic control system shut down due to an “incredibly rare” fault. Martin Rolfe says a flight plan with two identically named markers confused the computer system and ground everything to a halt. Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 First of all, let me start with an apology.
00:02 Obviously, it is never our intention
00:04 to delay anyone or have flights cancelled.
00:08 I understand completely how disruptive that is,
00:11 how frustrating it is, and how disappointing it is.
00:14 So I would like to start with that.
00:16 Now, in terms of how could this happen,
00:20 well, we process millions of flight plans every year.
00:23 In fact, we've processed around 15 million flight plans
00:27 since the system was put into operation.
00:30 And what it received was something
00:33 that was incredibly rare, a flight plan
00:36 that we had never seen before, which
00:38 had a combination of data that meant the system couldn't
00:42 decide what to do.
00:44 So when it was presented with this data
00:46 that it couldn't process, it decided
00:48 the safest course of action in these incredibly
00:50 rare circumstances was to shut itself down,
00:54 which prevents any way of that data getting to an air traffic
00:58 controller, which might be unsafe.
01:00 So our intent is always to be guided by safety.
01:04 So if we have a system that fails
01:07 and it doesn't know what to do next,
01:09 then we revert to manual processing
01:11 to keep everybody safe.