London, Thanasis Gavos

Its air traffic control system United Kingdom it went down last week due to technical problem happening “one in 15 million”said Nats managing director Martin Rolfe.

As he explained, citing the findings her research that is taking place, something similar has never happened before.

The problem was caused by a flight plan submitted at 8.32am on August 28 for an aircraft to cross British airspace. The automatic flight plan receipt and processing system detected two markers on the planned air route that had the same name, although they were in a different location.

As a result, the system was unable to understand which part of the flight plan involved UK airspace.

This technical misunderstanding caused the control system to be automatically suspended for safety reasons, so that potentially incorrect information about the aircraft’s path was not transmitted to air traffic controllers. The backup air traffic control system had the same reaction.

This automatic process took 20 seconds. Technicians struggled to identify the problem, which was finally resolved a few hours later when the company that made the software was called.

The technical problem caused it annulment over 2,000 flights to and from UK airports last week.