NATS publishes preliminary report on technical incident of 8 September
4 hours ago
- NATS published a preliminary report on the 8 September technical incident, requested by the Transport Secretary.
- The incident was caused by a software defect in a small part of the National Airspace System, unrelated to the August 2023 outage and not due to military action.
- The defect occurred when a manual aircraft code request was paused by a higher-priority message and resumed incorrectly, corrupting data within a millisecond.
- Restrictions limiting air traffic were applied across the UK for about six hours, mainly affecting flights in the London Area Control centre above 24,500ft.
- While safety was maintained throughout, the disruption affected hundreds of thousands of passengers and took over two days to clear.
- NATS plans to invest over £1 billion in systems and technology by 2033.