The UK's air traffic control system shut itself down after software confusion over an unusual flight path.
On the 28th August the UK’s air traffic control system to shut down, causing hundreds of flights to be delayed or cancelled. Before now the shutdown was blamed on a vague data processing glitch, but the exact cause has now been disclosed.
In its initial report published on Wednesday, [the National Air Traffic Service] said that at 08:32 on 28 August, its system received details of a flight which was due to cross UK airspace later that day.
The system detected that two markers along the planned route had the same name - even though they were in different places. As a result, it could not understand the UK portion of the flight plan.
This triggered the system to automatically stop working for safety reasons, so that no incorrect information was passed to [the National Air Traffic Service’s] air traffic controllers. The backup system then did the same thing.
Martin Rolfe, chief executive of [the National Air Traffic Service], said that the system did “what it was designed to do, i.e. fail safely when it receives data that it can’t process”.
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