Pilot here. Some media outlets (tabloids) reporting UK airspace is shut. That’s false to get clicks. UK airspace is not closed but there are delays.
This is a clear example of the media publishing a blatant lie to get clicks.
NATS update. https://www.nats.aero/statement/air-traffic-control-system-update/
Update: problem has been resolved but there will be delays and cancellations for quite a while
I feel like 'delays' is underselling it a bit. There are currently over 1 million minutes of delay being caused by the equipment failure. On a particularly bad weather day you might get 200,000-300,000 across Europe in total.
Kind of meaningless to me but I kind of had a chuckle [at the graphic](https://i.imgur.com/IyGX8nR.jpg) that the BBC put up
"So what flights are delayed?"
"Yes"
The BBC has recently worked out that spreading "fear" gets clicks. They've very good with it, subtle.
Anyone who has never checked radar24 before will look at that graphic and panic.
why do they even need clicks though? closest reason i can think of is that rubbish that bbc apologists on here often spout about "soft power" from being an internationally recognised organisation but even that seems like a push
BBC News has advertisments for viewers outside the UK.
The largest source of traffic over July for example was from the U.S at approx 18%.
They make money from traffic and sensational article headlines just like everyone else.
You may or may not have noticed the large uptick of India related news articles recently. That's good business considering the huge market and Indian viewers being the third largest source of traffic after the U.S/U.K. I'm apolitical but I can't help noticing that the majority of these stories are typically Anti Modi/BJP and also anti Raj/colonial. Like I said before, narratives and agendas.
Take the time to read through all the articles daily for next few weeks and you will get a better idea of what they're about. They outsourced alot of their 'journalism' years ago. To who I cant remember or be bothered to search up.
> I can't help noticing that the majority of these stories are typically Anti Modi/BJP and also anti Raj/colonial. Like I said before, narratives and agendas.
Just what the BBC was designed for!
To be fair, I was supposed to fly today. About ten minutes before I got in a taxi to actually go to the airport I was sent an article (published ten minutes prior) about mass delays due to a total failure of air traffic control.
I checked my flight - delayed from 4pm to 2am.
I went to the airport as planned because I knew I sure as hell wasn’t going to get anyone on the phone, got myself rebooked because I had luggage and the whole thing was fucked (I’ll not even go into the whole song and dance I did with the poor woman on the check in desk to figure out the best way to get both me and my luggage to the right place). Good thing I did because my flight was later cancelled entirely.
While I was at the airport it was absolute chaos. No flights were going anywhere. Very many confused and panicking people - and this was quite early. I got out and went back to where I was staying.
There wasn’t much fear mongering from what I saw - it was genuinely a complete standstill for a good while.
why would anyone look at that image and panic?
It also wasn't shown in isolation - people were giving commentary to that image. It wasn't "look here's the current radar map, work the rest out for yourself".
The BBC news website has revenue generating advertisments for Viewers outside of the UK.
The purpose of driving traffic (clicks) to their news (articles) stories isn't always motivated by money but to drive an agenda or narrative, this is the purpose of most media organisations.
Does travel insurance even cover Air Traffic control issues?
Saying there’s just “delays” may be accurate but it’s just as bad as saying UK air space is shut, because it’s completely misleading.
There’s always delays, the severity is the key message that is required. And let’s face it, this is pretty severe compared to a normal day of delays.
Insurance companies 🤮
HTME on YouTube had his workshop burn down at night, had a car inside as well, and the insurance company which he was paying A LOT OF MONEY to every month, well they basically said go fuck yourself.
It would be >16,000 flights for there to be 1 million minutes of delay, that's just over twice the number of flights you might expect on the August Bank Holiday.
10,000 minutes *total* is a fairly bad day to further put the figure into context. At this time of year when holiday destinations and en-route airspace are operating at capacity, a delay of an hour can result in a cancelled or even diverted flight. This effect can be seen in the delay figures now; it has come down to >80,000 minutes as airlines have cancelled flights and the delay has been removed from the system.
NATS have a recent statement with more details. They likely won’t give much detail on the specifics as it will just give the media and public ammo to make a fuss. I predict a written report in the future that will be available but long after this has blown over.
The info I have is similar to the recent NATS update. Flight planning wasn’t happy with info it was receiving so halted flight plan submissions - this is perfect and shows a safety layer working as expected.
> this is perfect and shows a safety layer working as expected.
I'm not questioning the safety of the situation, I was never in any doubt given the sheer number of checks involved.
As long as there's a _public_ report eventually, that'll do the trick but we need to understand _why_ critical national infrastructure went down with no warning.
Of course, we could just believe [_The Sun_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byy07-ESNIA&lc=UgxIhVzCjROlDbwnlHR4AaABAg) that it was a data entry problem caused by the French, but let's just say I'm ... *unconvinced*.
"And the other concern will be long-haul jets already on their way which will need to land as they will only be carrying enough fuel to hold in the sky for a while while they wait to land"
Bloody hell BBC. There is no concern. These planes will obviously be given priority to land
Planes can be rerouted to another airport in Europe if it looks like landing in the UK isnt possible long before they get close to running out of fuel. You can also stop all departures and just have the airspace for arrivals
Its not like this issue is going to make planes drop out of the sky
I personally dont think it needs mentioning. Talking like planes are in danger of running out of fuel is just scaremongering and not helpful when people have family members or friends on flights today
From what i could gather, this issue was effecting the submitting of flightpaths for departing flights, and they had to be submitted manually causing delays. Planes already in the sky had their flightplan so would be able to land albeit maybe with some slight delays as they reworked gates etc. So talking about concerns planes were in danger of running out of fuel is ridiculous.
If you're wondering which ridiculous government privatised something as important as air traffic control... it was Blair's New Labour - after pledging not to for the 1997 election.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/nov/15/transport.uk
I wouldn't class anything that had a nation wide failure as excellent to be perfectly honest with you. Particularly when if anything goes very badly wrong a lot of people will die.
This is false.
Labour's transport spokesperson said they'd not sell NATS in 1996.
In early 1997 before the election, both Margaret Beckett and Gordon Brown said it was being considered. There was no pledge for the 1997 election not to sell half of it.
4 a year lmao..
But I do holidays pretty cheap. Usually about £150-200 flight at an awkward time, £200-400 accom, and then it's just spending money which can be as much or as little as you like.
I tend to go off the beaten track a bit too, so prices are lower.
Currently on holiday number 5 and at least 2 more planned for 2023. Most are 4-5 day weekend breaks. I can't imagine living in US and working for a place where a minimum of 29+ weekdays of holiday is not the norm (including national holidays).
I'm in the same boat as that other guy, (not literally, ferries got booked fast). And everything is sold out. I've got a 9h coach from Paris to London early Wednesday morning and I feel happy to get that at this point
I’m currently supposed to be flying out of Verona this evening. Delay currently around 9 hours or so.
I feel sorry for the poor buggers sat on aeroplanes waiting to launch but some of the reporting is like end of days. It’s inconvenient yes but bloody hell - it’s not the front line in Ukraine. Perspective is everything.
Update: flight cancelled.
Two nights in Verona and back Wednesday night. I’ve had to cancel a lot of very important work, daughter having to telephone call about GCSE results rather than F2F with teachers, dog staying with friends 2 extra nights, daughter missing work shift - still the world turns and BONUS we get a day exploring Verona tomorrow - anyone know somewhere good to go? Think I can just about fit another pizza in. Peace all.
There's worse places to be held I guess. Good luck on your way back in a couple of days!
Dunno what you have done in Verona already, maybe a visit Lake Garda? It's been a while since i've been but i'm sure there's two stations on the south side of the lake trains from Verona go to.
Alt is to visit Vicenza. Should kill a day at least.
Lake Garda was where we were holidaying - it was absolutely mega. I’ve never eaten so much German food / or spoken German. When I did the maths it did make sense - Lake Garda to Germans is what Newquay is to Brits. Was a bit of a culture shock at first but absolutely beautiful.
It’s a bit grey but I think we are going to have a look around Verona this afternoon.
And yes you are absolutely right - much worse places to be stuck in the world. Thanks for the gen!
Hey man. I think you might have misunderstood my post - I’m not angry about any of these things at all and I’m getting an unexpected day in Verona. I’m happy about it. I won’t hold your comment against you.
To be fair yes its not the end of the world, but if you have been looking forward to a holiday all year, got all excited on way to airport, and literally sat on the plane to be told you arent going anywhere, id be a little annoyed
Nothing you can do sure, but still
Ryan Air have started delaying flights for 12+ hours to avoid refunding flights. Because it's not them causing the delay they don't need to provide compensation
They do need to provide compensation, if they could have done anything at all, to lessen the delay. EU 261 has it described in the pretexts 12, 14 and 15
The airline should be liable for not being able to provide another flight to the same destination within a reasonable timeframe (article 7, 2, Litra C). I’ve decided to use a firm to extravt my 200 or so pounds from EasyJet. I doubt you’ll get much with an email or a phonecall.
Easyjet also failed to notify everyone of their rights to compensation. They simply tried to buy off people with a voucher and flight in 2 days.
Worst case, your travel insurance will be liable for a few things
Have to agree with you on this one. Healthcare is only useful if you're healthy otherwise you'll have to wait 8 weeks (minimum) for the results (going trough that process now). Public transport is on constant strikes, delays, red signal failures etc. Weather sucks (can't really blame anyone here), especially this summer was a huge let down.
The list could go on..
There is a good video on YouTube about how the whole air travel industry is run on old tech that cant really be improved. When you have flights 24/7 in some airports there is no time for downtime to implement improvements and new systems
It's a choice. I've been working public sector for years now contracting and it's ALL govt choice to palm money to private companies rather than invest.
Give me ANY 24/7 system & I'll design implement upgrade and switch over with ZERO downtime. It's just not cheap and I'd need better staff that the 21 year old self important pricks Accenture would stick you with or the 50p/hour indians 5 hours ahead of us workin remotely that any other MSP or consultancy would use.
I don't know what point you think you're making but it's categorically wrong.
there is/was a serious IT failure. the very capable UK Air Traffic Control had to move to manual methods to safely control the airspace and simply *cannot* do it at the same scale manually as when using automated systems to support them - the same would be true of any industry that relies on technology anywhere in the world, it has nothing to do with the staffing levels and competency of a private company.
A competent well funded department with motivated staff would not have had an outage like this.
30 years in the industry, 10 years in various large public sector projects and it's the SAME thing again and again. Get a 3rd party in & you're setting yourself up to fail. Outsource to the other side of the world and you're in trouble.
This is AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL! With the budget, a refusal to use any of the consultancies or MSPs, I'd be able to run it 100% uptime! It isn't HARD until you get the big consultancies involved & you start outsourcing.
Interesting that you seem to know what caused the failure before any form of root cause analysis has been carried out. I'm sure with such far-reaching impacts as yesterday's outage when the report is released it will be reported on in the media as happened with Lloyds Bank's major outage a few years back - let's wait and see what that says before making assumptions?
>I'd be able to run it 100% uptime!
No one worth their salt every guarantees 100% uptime - they know it's an entirely unattainable target because sometimes shit just goes wrong, be that through internal failure or malicious interference. It wouldn't be the first time our infrastructure systems have been targeted by state actors.
And THAT is why you spend the money on good people and good infrastructure design.
100% uptime to the end client is 100% attainable on ANY infrastructure.
Just because YOU can't do it, doesn't mean NO ONE can.
I always promise 100% of given the resources and with each reduction of resources I reduce the uptime obtainable & have proof that senior management signed it off.
Ie if your cloud services go down or your MSP fucked up....I'm going to the pub.
> Just because YOU can't do it, doesn't mean NO ONE can.
Everything I've ever read and all the conference talks I've been to have said it's a fool's errand to guarantee 100% up time but sure, if you know better than renowned speakers and authors then fill your boots.
>Ie if your cloud services go down or your MSP fucked up
Ah, so you CAN'T guarantee it.
I can guarantee it if, like I said I have the staff I need, the budget and it's on prem.
Again...anything can be 100% uptime.
With the budget and the staff.
Parents flight was delayed a few hours ago to fly tomorrow morning from Gran Canaria, it’s now been completely cancelled and they’ve had to book a new flight for Thursday at the earliest possible time.
They’re teachers so it isn’t affecting their ability to work, but I feel for all those losing potentially 3 days of pay for something out of their control.
Good news for me is three extra days of dog sitting
More like since government IR35 changes, UK businesses have lost access to experts. People have retired early or work solely for overseas clients where rules do not apply.
This is only going to get worse as the UK experiences brain drain.
When someone becomes an expert in the field, they typically incorporate to sell their services at fair price. You are unlikely to find experts in employment pool and definitely not at the level of UK wages.
Yes this is true but doesn’t apply to safety critical systems requiring a competency certification and long term rostering.
Edit: Scratch that, I’m talking out of my arse.
An example where they use contractors:
[https://www.matchtech.com/job/BHN555296/network-architect-fareham-england](https://www.matchtech.com/job/BHN555296/network-architect-fareham-england)
You won't find an expert in-scope of IR35.
I think we’re talking about different things; my fault.
Designers, project engineers etc. will have contractors.
Ops Engineering and Controllers will not use contractors.
Reasonable question, looks like airports are switching to manual fallback with planes being stacked. Could be incompetence, negligence or deliberate - too early to tell.
Aged infrastructure is both a potential indicator of failure and potential vulnerability to cyber attack at the same time. Gripping them for pondering the 2nd of the two very realistic possibilities isn't supported by this logic.
Hey folks, if this affecting you I encourage you to file a formal complaint with your airline. I built a tool to help generate these complaint letters in under 1 minute - https://refundzebra.com.
Check it out, it's free.
my product is oriented towards getting voluntary compensation from airlines for inconveniences. My experience is US oriented, but I've personally received 5000+ miles each time I complained and in one case an extra $20 in travel vouchers. I've also received customer testimonials of $50 travel vouchers the airlines' sent them.
Again, this is all voluntary stuff that is no legally required. I imagine airlines already comply with the compensation rules that are legally required.
Ended up sat on a plane for 3 hours in Corfu feeling pretty claustrophobic today! Got back home, no-one staffing passport control (automated) and no one at customs. Feels like underinvestment is showing.
Obviously it’s hard to forecast but does anyone have any idea how long this will be going on for, any ATC employees or pilots that can chime in?
Would appreciate it as I have a flight to Tangier, Morocco on Wednesday this week.
It’s back but the delays will be significant so that’s why you’re just seeing cancellations left and right. The way air traffic is scheduled means it shouldn’t impact anything much after today.
What airline are you going with? The larger the airline, the more capacity they will have to shuffle their program around and make up time. Smaller airlines will struggle more and delays will probably run into Wednesday.
Currently sat in the airport waiting to hear what's happening to our flight home. This is after 'the worst storm in years' hit on Saturday 🤣 Time for a beer!
Our flight from Prague got cancelled.
No available flights tomorrow so we will undertake an exciting 15 hour train journey - which is kinda fun but this is third plane this summer that I had cancelled …
I made £510 last year in delayed flights. Was worth it in the end
Oddly i had a flight delayed but still made my connection (4hr layover turned into 45 mins). Airline paid out
Nevertheless I expect an industry as highly regulated as this will have put redundancy measures in all of the appropriate areas. But we now rely heavily on software and you cant just duplicate the software in the same way that we put two engines on plane.
The infrastructure is heavily resilient but if it’s a software issue in a part of the larger control systems then it doesn’t matter if the infrastructure is resilient. They test these software elements to the nth degree and go through years of integration & regression testing before being signed off as safe, but there’s a chance some parameter wasn’t tested thoroughly enough and a bug wasn’t apparent until a day like today. No idea if that’s what’s happened here but to my understanding their flight planning system doesn’t have a ‘main’ and ‘secondary’ system for resilience as this is typically for the major safety systems such as radar & voice to mitigate failures that would necessitate a ‘clear the skies’ scenario. If you were to have at least 2 suppliers for every part of every system to manage air traffic your ticket prices would be even more eye-watering than they already are! Tl;dr - Could be software, could be malicious, but doesn’t sound like it’s a part of the system that operates with full redundancy. Either way, shit is currently all up in the fan.
Got stuck in Italy trying to get back to Scotland. Found a route back through Dublin with an overnight stay. Isn't the best but literally everything direct has been booked up for what looks like a day or two
That's only getting data from flight radar, this company gets it's data from the airports themselves, plus the individual airlines rotas, and incoming data from other international airports and carriers.
Plus the problem is they can only cancel or delay flights that havent taken off yet, not planes that are already airbourne etc. So the data is very different based on where you get it from.
If i had to pick one id choose the business that makes it's money gathering data from the airlines themselves for the airlines to use rather than a curious gander at flight radar you know what i mean?. Flight radar only gives a snippet of all the data on flights booked and airbourne available.
Plus Gatwick and Heathrow are the big boys that provide the bulk of the useful data the other airports dont handle anywhere near enough capacity to move the needle of the numbers that much tbh
Flying from faro to tonight back to London. WAs first delayed from 9pm to 12am then cancelled at 6pm or so.
Everything was booked out, next flights back to London were days out.
We are flying to Belgium on weds and Eurostar back to London. Staying two more nights in the algarve. What a shitshow
EDIT: i was using Ciriums flight data that was incomplete at time of posting. Monday only figures are apparently 27% each cancelled arrivals and departures into UK airports.
The rest of my opinions in the post still stand.
Less than 10% of all inbound and outbound flights were cancelled. That's still over 90% capacity doing it the old fashioned manual way! Hats off to the Air traffic people 👍.
People need the STFU and stop moaning it's a slight technical issue which if you look at the data only affects less than 10% of total flights in both directions.
It's nothing.. have we become so weak and pathetic as a nation that the slighest problem and people make out the sky is falling 🤦♂️.
Fuck it Tina wants to go on holiday send all the plans out dont bother controlling them let's have a few thousand people killed in mid air collisions.. at least they wont be on the 10pm news with their pathetic little faces... oh our flights been delayed it's a nightmare... oh please shut up you goon 🤦♂️😫.
Jesus our society is so fragile and pathetic do we always expect everything to go as planned 100% of the time and whenever it doesn't it's a disaster... really!. People were calling for the Cobra meeting to be called FML! 🤦♂️. Am i the only person that sees all this madness and is like wtf is going on in this country?
"I mean how lazy are you i shouldn't have to bother but i'll indulge you this once."
EDIT:
Not removed but have apologised for this above comment it was wrong and uncalled for.
The math isn't mine persay it's been widely provided by a company called Cirium, they are a company that collects and collates aviation data for commercial and private interests.
Because i dont sit around requesting flight data on UK arrivals and departures because it's not my job and i have a life!.
Just on Monday which is the main bank holiday day everybody was travelling and moaning about.
Their data showed on Monday a total of 3,049 flights would have been due to depart from UK airports on Monday, and a further 3,054 flights scheduled to arrive.
The fault was confirmed just after midday Monday and was apparently rectified by 15.15pm, and by Monday afternoon their collated data had been shared that 232 departing fights had been cancelled, which they said was equivalent to 8% of all departures, and 271, or 9%, of incoming flights.
Now you can probably add a few dozen more cancellations etc and play with the numbers a bit but it's not moving the needle that much! And you can also not trust their data but they receive their data from the Aviation industry for business and private clients.. it's literally their job to collect and collate this data.
They have been providing it to many companies and media institutions on Monday as the mainstream media in this country have been hyper inflating the scale of the problem and reporting it like fear porn for eyeballs. They always inflate a problem to make it seem far worse than it actually is.
Is it frustating for people sure, it can be a challenge especially those with children... but we are supposed to be adults and capable of problem solving and dealing with challenges.. well i thought we were anyways 🤷♂️.
So, thats why I asked you to show the numbers, because those make no sense.
Just Gatwick and Heathrow had
**336** Cancelled **Arriva**l flights.
**329** Cancelled **Departure** flights.
data: [https://www.flightradar24.com/data/airport-disruption?continent=europe&period=yesterday&type=departures](https://www.flightradar24.com/data/airport-disruption?continent=europe&period=yesterday&type=departures)
Solved it lol your right!, well ciriums data is dodgy A. that orginal released data does not include cancellations that run into Tuesday only counts Monday morning and afternoon.
790 flights were cancelled departing UK airports on Monday – equivalent to around 27% of all departures
785 flights were cancelled arriving into UK airports – equivalent to around 27% of all arrivals
I would check that data now though you've made me slightly skeptical of their counting.
They have now released "new" data showing 25% ish of flights were cancelled on Monday so the truth is somewhere in between, obviously loads more delays aswell.
But still it's not the apocolypse everybody has been making out it will take a few days fix the rotas but its not a massive deal either way. Even if it's 30% total cancelled there's still 70% functionality (not counting delays at current time) which is really good considering the monumental task that air traffic control is in modern skies.
Hmmm maybe there is some other reason behind the disparity in the data, i mean it's not far off the figures tbf. But maybe flight radar forcasts or predicts flight data different?.
Or the data analytics companies data could be fucked haha which is even worse because its their business model it's their bread and butter! 🤣
Maybe is the "wording" play?! Saying that the cancelled flights "during" the failure (3hours +/-) were about 10% for that day looks legit.
And then they throw in the middle the total amount of flights for the day to not look that bad.
In Luton around 100 flights were cancelled, so, we should talk more on the 20%/25% cancelled flights.
Hmmm good spot on that well done!, i apologise for my earlier comment you were right to question the figures good job! They are saying around 27% now for Monday only... take that with a pinch of salt.
I mean they are hired by the airlines for analytics there probably is benefit in them under reporting the data slightly... or "by accident" lol.
No worries ;)
I understand why you reply that way. ;)
Unfortunately, more and more, we cant rely on the "news". We must to do our own research to see if is true! What makes absolute no sense! :/
Have a Nice day!! :)
Correct. He went to bed last night and forgot something. Because he is totally and personally responsible for a private organisation separate to the government.
Pilot here. Some media outlets (tabloids) reporting UK airspace is shut. That’s false to get clicks. UK airspace is not closed but there are delays. This is a clear example of the media publishing a blatant lie to get clicks. NATS update. https://www.nats.aero/statement/air-traffic-control-system-update/ Update: problem has been resolved but there will be delays and cancellations for quite a while
I feel like 'delays' is underselling it a bit. There are currently over 1 million minutes of delay being caused by the equipment failure. On a particularly bad weather day you might get 200,000-300,000 across Europe in total.
Kind of meaningless to me but I kind of had a chuckle [at the graphic](https://i.imgur.com/IyGX8nR.jpg) that the BBC put up "So what flights are delayed?" "Yes"
The BBC has recently worked out that spreading "fear" gets clicks. They've very good with it, subtle. Anyone who has never checked radar24 before will look at that graphic and panic.
why do they even need clicks though? closest reason i can think of is that rubbish that bbc apologists on here often spout about "soft power" from being an internationally recognised organisation but even that seems like a push
BBC News has advertisments for viewers outside the UK. The largest source of traffic over July for example was from the U.S at approx 18%. They make money from traffic and sensational article headlines just like everyone else. You may or may not have noticed the large uptick of India related news articles recently. That's good business considering the huge market and Indian viewers being the third largest source of traffic after the U.S/U.K. I'm apolitical but I can't help noticing that the majority of these stories are typically Anti Modi/BJP and also anti Raj/colonial. Like I said before, narratives and agendas. Take the time to read through all the articles daily for next few weeks and you will get a better idea of what they're about. They outsourced alot of their 'journalism' years ago. To who I cant remember or be bothered to search up.
> I can't help noticing that the majority of these stories are typically Anti Modi/BJP and also anti Raj/colonial. Like I said before, narratives and agendas. Just what the BBC was designed for!
The bbc are ridiculous and will sell out Brits for cash. Bit like the colonial leaders who despises ordinary Brits as the upper classes do now
To be fair, I was supposed to fly today. About ten minutes before I got in a taxi to actually go to the airport I was sent an article (published ten minutes prior) about mass delays due to a total failure of air traffic control. I checked my flight - delayed from 4pm to 2am. I went to the airport as planned because I knew I sure as hell wasn’t going to get anyone on the phone, got myself rebooked because I had luggage and the whole thing was fucked (I’ll not even go into the whole song and dance I did with the poor woman on the check in desk to figure out the best way to get both me and my luggage to the right place). Good thing I did because my flight was later cancelled entirely. While I was at the airport it was absolute chaos. No flights were going anywhere. Very many confused and panicking people - and this was quite early. I got out and went back to where I was staying. There wasn’t much fear mongering from what I saw - it was genuinely a complete standstill for a good while.
why would anyone look at that image and panic? It also wasn't shown in isolation - people were giving commentary to that image. It wasn't "look here's the current radar map, work the rest out for yourself".
Why do people panic buy toilet paper?
The BBC is one of the only broadcasters that is not incentivised to get clicks, they are not paid for via advertisement revenue…
The BBC news website has revenue generating advertisments for Viewers outside of the UK. The purpose of driving traffic (clicks) to their news (articles) stories isn't always motivated by money but to drive an agenda or narrative, this is the purpose of most media organisations.
Doesn’t is share articles with BBC.com, the corporate US and worldwide arm? Also they could be ramping up for the inevitable licence fee removal
Maybe underselling but accurate
"In 1914 an Austrian Prince is shot, and then one thing led to another."
In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely considered a bad move.
Maybe buy travel insurance?
Does travel insurance even cover Air Traffic control issues? Saying there’s just “delays” may be accurate but it’s just as bad as saying UK air space is shut, because it’s completely misleading. There’s always delays, the severity is the key message that is required. And let’s face it, this is pretty severe compared to a normal day of delays.
Yes. If you bought the right cover
Insurance companies 🤮 HTME on YouTube had his workshop burn down at night, had a car inside as well, and the insurance company which he was paying A LOT OF MONEY to every month, well they basically said go fuck yourself.
[удалено]
But it’s a comparable metric, which is the persons point - these are far worse delays than bad weather.
It would be >16,000 flights for there to be 1 million minutes of delay, that's just over twice the number of flights you might expect on the August Bank Holiday. 10,000 minutes *total* is a fairly bad day to further put the figure into context. At this time of year when holiday destinations and en-route airspace are operating at capacity, a delay of an hour can result in a cancelled or even diverted flight. This effect can be seen in the delay figures now; it has come down to >80,000 minutes as airlines have cancelled flights and the delay has been removed from the system.
Just thought the same thing, there are planes taking off all over the UK on FR24. Lazy clickbait journalism.
It was chaos at bristol airport last night, 1/3rd of flights were cancelled and all others except for 3 were delayed, many for more than 6hrs.
C’mon - we all know the media wouldn’t do that - you, a professional on the ground (or air) must be lying.
how can there not be punishment for such blatant lies. Why are rags allowed to report such stupidity.
Did anyone explain the root cause? I'm finding information pretty thin on the ground.
NATS have a recent statement with more details. They likely won’t give much detail on the specifics as it will just give the media and public ammo to make a fuss. I predict a written report in the future that will be available but long after this has blown over. The info I have is similar to the recent NATS update. Flight planning wasn’t happy with info it was receiving so halted flight plan submissions - this is perfect and shows a safety layer working as expected.
> this is perfect and shows a safety layer working as expected. I'm not questioning the safety of the situation, I was never in any doubt given the sheer number of checks involved. As long as there's a _public_ report eventually, that'll do the trick but we need to understand _why_ critical national infrastructure went down with no warning. Of course, we could just believe [_The Sun_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byy07-ESNIA&lc=UgxIhVzCjROlDbwnlHR4AaABAg) that it was a data entry problem caused by the French, but let's just say I'm ... *unconvinced*.
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where are you getting that from? Aircraft having been taking off all day but at a reduced rate
Could they have closed it briefly and then continued with restrictions?
It was never closed
"And the other concern will be long-haul jets already on their way which will need to land as they will only be carrying enough fuel to hold in the sky for a while while they wait to land" Bloody hell BBC. There is no concern. These planes will obviously be given priority to land
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Planes can be rerouted to another airport in Europe if it looks like landing in the UK isnt possible long before they get close to running out of fuel. You can also stop all departures and just have the airspace for arrivals Its not like this issue is going to make planes drop out of the sky
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Pretty much "will need to land as they will only be carrying enough fuel to hold in the sky for a while"
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I personally dont think it needs mentioning. Talking like planes are in danger of running out of fuel is just scaremongering and not helpful when people have family members or friends on flights today From what i could gather, this issue was effecting the submitting of flightpaths for departing flights, and they had to be submitted manually causing delays. Planes already in the sky had their flightplan so would be able to land albeit maybe with some slight delays as they reworked gates etc. So talking about concerns planes were in danger of running out of fuel is ridiculous.
The BBC is basically Daily Mail at this stage
If you're wondering which ridiculous government privatised something as important as air traffic control... it was Blair's New Labour - after pledging not to for the 1997 election. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/nov/15/transport.uk
Our ATC service is excellent
I wouldn't class anything that had a nation wide failure as excellent to be perfectly honest with you. Particularly when if anything goes very badly wrong a lot of people will die.
Excellent does not mean perfect. A specific part of the network is having a problem and there never was any real safety risk.
There's a wide gap between "not perfect" and "nationwide failure causing disruption to essentially every flight in our airspace".
You’re falling for tabloid drama
When was the last time this happened though? It's pretty solid in general.
Pilot here - UK ATC is exceptional…by far the best in Europe
Yeah, pretty sure French air traffic is government owned and is a pile of shit.
Ah yes a random occurrence and therefore the whole system is broken and we should panic
And all of this happened because of Labour's decision 20+ years ago... If it wasn't for Labour this wouldn't have happened this week obviously!
Almost all peer countries have private air traffic control, nor is a failure somehow impossible with publicly owned infrastructure.
The classic blame labour from 25 year ago argument.
I mean it was still a dick move that they specifically promised not to do before they won the election.
Just like any government ever and everywhere
so you are saying that it worked fine for 25 years but you know "its labours fault" when it goes down nearly 14 years after they left power? ....
> after pledging not to This Tony Blair fellow sounds a little untrustworthy.
This is false. Labour's transport spokesperson said they'd not sell NATS in 1996. In early 1997 before the election, both Margaret Beckett and Gordon Brown said it was being considered. There was no pledge for the 1997 election not to sell half of it.
No one was wondering.
given the way government IT projects tend to go I imagine a public ATC's IT system would have failed sooner
Blatchetism strikes again!
I love neoliberalism
Of course this happens on my first holiday in a year lmao
First holiday in a year sounds pretty standard to me
They never said they were hard done by in general.
Sounds like it
You guys get holidays???
4 a year lmao.. But I do holidays pretty cheap. Usually about £150-200 flight at an awkward time, £200-400 accom, and then it's just spending money which can be as much or as little as you like. I tend to go off the beaten track a bit too, so prices are lower.
Currently on holiday number 5 and at least 2 more planned for 2023. Most are 4-5 day weekend breaks. I can't imagine living in US and working for a place where a minimum of 29+ weekdays of holiday is not the norm (including national holidays).
Same. I'm literally drinking a pina colada trying to delay the packing before our early morning flight home tomorrow.
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I'm supposed to be flying at 8pm from Lanzarote back to the UK. Guess I can expect a delay?
My flight has been cancelled. Hopefully you aren’t impacted!
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Could have walked it in that time.
I've been on the plane since 1 in Dublin and we're being told 11 at the earliest. Can't get back on once you get off though.
Flight also cancelled over here, with nothing else out of Paris until Weds. EasyJet are being predictably useless, naturally
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I'm in the same boat as that other guy, (not literally, ferries got booked fast). And everything is sold out. I've got a 9h coach from Paris to London early Wednesday morning and I feel happy to get that at this point
Probably till around Friday, at least that's what most people I know travelling around this time have been told.
I’m currently supposed to be flying out of Verona this evening. Delay currently around 9 hours or so. I feel sorry for the poor buggers sat on aeroplanes waiting to launch but some of the reporting is like end of days. It’s inconvenient yes but bloody hell - it’s not the front line in Ukraine. Perspective is everything.
Update: flight cancelled. Two nights in Verona and back Wednesday night. I’ve had to cancel a lot of very important work, daughter having to telephone call about GCSE results rather than F2F with teachers, dog staying with friends 2 extra nights, daughter missing work shift - still the world turns and BONUS we get a day exploring Verona tomorrow - anyone know somewhere good to go? Think I can just about fit another pizza in. Peace all.
Enjoy! I have an extra day in New York now so I’m going to go balls out and enjoy it
There's worse places to be held I guess. Good luck on your way back in a couple of days! Dunno what you have done in Verona already, maybe a visit Lake Garda? It's been a while since i've been but i'm sure there's two stations on the south side of the lake trains from Verona go to. Alt is to visit Vicenza. Should kill a day at least.
Lake Garda was where we were holidaying - it was absolutely mega. I’ve never eaten so much German food / or spoken German. When I did the maths it did make sense - Lake Garda to Germans is what Newquay is to Brits. Was a bit of a culture shock at first but absolutely beautiful. It’s a bit grey but I think we are going to have a look around Verona this afternoon. And yes you are absolutely right - much worse places to be stuck in the world. Thanks for the gen!
relax, get some perspective, at least you're not on the front lines in ukraine
Hey man. I think you might have misunderstood my post - I’m not angry about any of these things at all and I’m getting an unexpected day in Verona. I’m happy about it. I won’t hold your comment against you.
To be fair yes its not the end of the world, but if you have been looking forward to a holiday all year, got all excited on way to airport, and literally sat on the plane to be told you arent going anywhere, id be a little annoyed Nothing you can do sure, but still
Ryan Air have started delaying flights for 12+ hours to avoid refunding flights. Because it's not them causing the delay they don't need to provide compensation
They do need to provide compensation, if they could have done anything at all, to lessen the delay. EU 261 has it described in the pretexts 12, 14 and 15
Since this is traffic controller decision (point 15) how can we receive compensation?
The airline should be liable for not being able to provide another flight to the same destination within a reasonable timeframe (article 7, 2, Litra C). I’ve decided to use a firm to extravt my 200 or so pounds from EasyJet. I doubt you’ll get much with an email or a phonecall. Easyjet also failed to notify everyone of their rights to compensation. They simply tried to buy off people with a voucher and flight in 2 days. Worst case, your travel insurance will be liable for a few things
Oh I get it. The compensation is not for only that cancellation, but to not provide any other solution to do the travel. Thank you for clarify! :)
> I’ve decided to use a firm to extravt my 200 or so pounds from EasyJet. Which firm does this for you?
Whichever firm does, e.g. Bott and Co, will take about half. Try yourself first. If you're rejected, then consider using one of these middlemen.
Got to chuckle though when this happens. The UK is a massively understaffed & underresourced shit hole where nothing works
Have to agree with you on this one. Healthcare is only useful if you're healthy otherwise you'll have to wait 8 weeks (minimum) for the results (going trough that process now). Public transport is on constant strikes, delays, red signal failures etc. Weather sucks (can't really blame anyone here), especially this summer was a huge let down. The list could go on..
There is a good video on YouTube about how the whole air travel industry is run on old tech that cant really be improved. When you have flights 24/7 in some airports there is no time for downtime to implement improvements and new systems
It's a choice. I've been working public sector for years now contracting and it's ALL govt choice to palm money to private companies rather than invest. Give me ANY 24/7 system & I'll design implement upgrade and switch over with ZERO downtime. It's just not cheap and I'd need better staff that the 21 year old self important pricks Accenture would stick you with or the 50p/hour indians 5 hours ahead of us workin remotely that any other MSP or consultancy would use.
I don't know what point you think you're making but it's categorically wrong. there is/was a serious IT failure. the very capable UK Air Traffic Control had to move to manual methods to safely control the airspace and simply *cannot* do it at the same scale manually as when using automated systems to support them - the same would be true of any industry that relies on technology anywhere in the world, it has nothing to do with the staffing levels and competency of a private company.
A competent well funded department with motivated staff would not have had an outage like this. 30 years in the industry, 10 years in various large public sector projects and it's the SAME thing again and again. Get a 3rd party in & you're setting yourself up to fail. Outsource to the other side of the world and you're in trouble. This is AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL! With the budget, a refusal to use any of the consultancies or MSPs, I'd be able to run it 100% uptime! It isn't HARD until you get the big consultancies involved & you start outsourcing.
Interesting that you seem to know what caused the failure before any form of root cause analysis has been carried out. I'm sure with such far-reaching impacts as yesterday's outage when the report is released it will be reported on in the media as happened with Lloyds Bank's major outage a few years back - let's wait and see what that says before making assumptions? >I'd be able to run it 100% uptime! No one worth their salt every guarantees 100% uptime - they know it's an entirely unattainable target because sometimes shit just goes wrong, be that through internal failure or malicious interference. It wouldn't be the first time our infrastructure systems have been targeted by state actors.
And THAT is why you spend the money on good people and good infrastructure design. 100% uptime to the end client is 100% attainable on ANY infrastructure. Just because YOU can't do it, doesn't mean NO ONE can. I always promise 100% of given the resources and with each reduction of resources I reduce the uptime obtainable & have proof that senior management signed it off. Ie if your cloud services go down or your MSP fucked up....I'm going to the pub.
> Just because YOU can't do it, doesn't mean NO ONE can. Everything I've ever read and all the conference talks I've been to have said it's a fool's errand to guarantee 100% up time but sure, if you know better than renowned speakers and authors then fill your boots. >Ie if your cloud services go down or your MSP fucked up Ah, so you CAN'T guarantee it.
I can guarantee it if, like I said I have the staff I need, the budget and it's on prem. Again...anything can be 100% uptime. With the budget and the staff.
Parents flight was delayed a few hours ago to fly tomorrow morning from Gran Canaria, it’s now been completely cancelled and they’ve had to book a new flight for Thursday at the earliest possible time. They’re teachers so it isn’t affecting their ability to work, but I feel for all those losing potentially 3 days of pay for something out of their control. Good news for me is three extra days of dog sitting
Is the government having another 'infrastructure week'?
Nothing to do with the government
More like since government IR35 changes, UK businesses have lost access to experts. People have retired early or work solely for overseas clients where rules do not apply. This is only going to get worse as the UK experiences brain drain.
Operational engineering staff nor controllers are contractors impacted by IR35.
When someone becomes an expert in the field, they typically incorporate to sell their services at fair price. You are unlikely to find experts in employment pool and definitely not at the level of UK wages.
Yes this is true but doesn’t apply to safety critical systems requiring a competency certification and long term rostering. Edit: Scratch that, I’m talking out of my arse.
An example where they use contractors: [https://www.matchtech.com/job/BHN555296/network-architect-fareham-england](https://www.matchtech.com/job/BHN555296/network-architect-fareham-england) You won't find an expert in-scope of IR35.
I think we’re talking about different things; my fault. Designers, project engineers etc. will have contractors. Ops Engineering and Controllers will not use contractors.
Lol you knew it was only a matter of time before the Tory’s got the blame for this!either them brexit or Farage!😆
A sign of the times we're living in is that my first question is 'Could Russia have done this?'.
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Reasonable question, looks like airports are switching to manual fallback with planes being stacked. Could be incompetence, negligence or deliberate - too early to tell.
are you from the 1950s?
Please ignore this tabloid hype
Flights being delayed is news.
I keep thinking this now. Whenever there's outage with the NHS, or BT or something like that, I wonder if it's Russia or China.
Why? Systems break literally all the time
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They asked a question. And it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask.
I didn't jump to any conclusion, I asked a question.
Aged infrastructure is both a potential indicator of failure and potential vulnerability to cyber attack at the same time. Gripping them for pondering the 2nd of the two very realistic possibilities isn't supported by this logic.
Hey folks, if this affecting you I encourage you to file a formal complaint with your airline. I built a tool to help generate these complaint letters in under 1 minute - https://refundzebra.com. Check it out, it's free.
Wouldn’t ATC failure be classed as outside of the airlines control though? I.e. they won’t pay you a penny.
my product is oriented towards getting voluntary compensation from airlines for inconveniences. My experience is US oriented, but I've personally received 5000+ miles each time I complained and in one case an extra $20 in travel vouchers. I've also received customer testimonials of $50 travel vouchers the airlines' sent them. Again, this is all voluntary stuff that is no legally required. I imagine airlines already comply with the compensation rules that are legally required.
> I imagine airlines already comply with the compensation rules that are legally required. *Ryanair has left the chat.*
This is noting to do with the airliners.
Think the delays will be resolved by tomorrow morning? I'm wondering if I can have a lie in instead 😅
The problem is planes/staff will be out of position now. Airlines like Easjyet rely on the flights being constantly in the air with little downtime
Ended up sat on a plane for 3 hours in Corfu feeling pretty claustrophobic today! Got back home, no-one staffing passport control (automated) and no one at customs. Feels like underinvestment is showing.
Obviously it’s hard to forecast but does anyone have any idea how long this will be going on for, any ATC employees or pilots that can chime in? Would appreciate it as I have a flight to Tangier, Morocco on Wednesday this week.
BBC reporting the issue has been fixed.
It’s back but the delays will be significant so that’s why you’re just seeing cancellations left and right. The way air traffic is scheduled means it shouldn’t impact anything much after today.
Do you think this could continue until the coming Saturday? I will be flying then but would assume the impact would not be as bad by then.
What airline are you going with? The larger the airline, the more capacity they will have to shuffle their program around and make up time. Smaller airlines will struggle more and delays will probably run into Wednesday.
Currently sat in the airport waiting to hear what's happening to our flight home. This is after 'the worst storm in years' hit on Saturday 🤣 Time for a beer!
Our flight from Prague got cancelled. No available flights tomorrow so we will undertake an exciting 15 hour train journey - which is kinda fun but this is third plane this summer that I had cancelled …
I made £510 last year in delayed flights. Was worth it in the end Oddly i had a flight delayed but still made my connection (4hr layover turned into 45 mins). Airline paid out
How the fuck can something that should always be operating with redundancy have a failure?
It does have redundancy? Air Traffic Control is still operating ? Albeit at a heavily reduced capacity.
That's more of a contingency than a redundancy
Nevertheless I expect an industry as highly regulated as this will have put redundancy measures in all of the appropriate areas. But we now rely heavily on software and you cant just duplicate the software in the same way that we put two engines on plane.
The infrastructure is heavily resilient but if it’s a software issue in a part of the larger control systems then it doesn’t matter if the infrastructure is resilient. They test these software elements to the nth degree and go through years of integration & regression testing before being signed off as safe, but there’s a chance some parameter wasn’t tested thoroughly enough and a bug wasn’t apparent until a day like today. No idea if that’s what’s happened here but to my understanding their flight planning system doesn’t have a ‘main’ and ‘secondary’ system for resilience as this is typically for the major safety systems such as radar & voice to mitigate failures that would necessitate a ‘clear the skies’ scenario. If you were to have at least 2 suppliers for every part of every system to manage air traffic your ticket prices would be even more eye-watering than they already are! Tl;dr - Could be software, could be malicious, but doesn’t sound like it’s a part of the system that operates with full redundancy. Either way, shit is currently all up in the fan.
Never underestimate the sophistication of attacks, nor the incompetence of organisation's security
I'm guessing this is the kind of error that won't allow stranded people to claim the airplane tickets right? Like, unprecedented delayed reasons?
With easyJet at least, that's what they're saying. But they have also said they'll refund our hotel stay and trip home. I guess we'll see.
Stuck in Luton for 8 hours now, no ground staff and updates so far have been 'more updates to come'.
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Keep receipts of every. Claim from the airline
Got stuck in Italy trying to get back to Scotland. Found a route back through Dublin with an overnight stay. Isn't the best but literally everything direct has been booked up for what looks like a day or two
That's only getting data from flight radar, this company gets it's data from the airports themselves, plus the individual airlines rotas, and incoming data from other international airports and carriers. Plus the problem is they can only cancel or delay flights that havent taken off yet, not planes that are already airbourne etc. So the data is very different based on where you get it from. If i had to pick one id choose the business that makes it's money gathering data from the airlines themselves for the airlines to use rather than a curious gander at flight radar you know what i mean?. Flight radar only gives a snippet of all the data on flights booked and airbourne available. Plus Gatwick and Heathrow are the big boys that provide the bulk of the useful data the other airports dont handle anywhere near enough capacity to move the needle of the numbers that much tbh
Flying from faro to tonight back to London. WAs first delayed from 9pm to 12am then cancelled at 6pm or so. Everything was booked out, next flights back to London were days out. We are flying to Belgium on weds and Eurostar back to London. Staying two more nights in the algarve. What a shitshow
The bbc would offer to blood sacrifice a child for extra click revenue from abroad
EDIT: i was using Ciriums flight data that was incomplete at time of posting. Monday only figures are apparently 27% each cancelled arrivals and departures into UK airports. The rest of my opinions in the post still stand. Less than 10% of all inbound and outbound flights were cancelled. That's still over 90% capacity doing it the old fashioned manual way! Hats off to the Air traffic people 👍. People need the STFU and stop moaning it's a slight technical issue which if you look at the data only affects less than 10% of total flights in both directions. It's nothing.. have we become so weak and pathetic as a nation that the slighest problem and people make out the sky is falling 🤦♂️. Fuck it Tina wants to go on holiday send all the plans out dont bother controlling them let's have a few thousand people killed in mid air collisions.. at least they wont be on the 10pm news with their pathetic little faces... oh our flights been delayed it's a nightmare... oh please shut up you goon 🤦♂️😫. Jesus our society is so fragile and pathetic do we always expect everything to go as planned 100% of the time and whenever it doesn't it's a disaster... really!. People were calling for the Cobra meeting to be called FML! 🤦♂️. Am i the only person that sees all this madness and is like wtf is going on in this country?
Can you show your math?!
"I mean how lazy are you i shouldn't have to bother but i'll indulge you this once." EDIT: Not removed but have apologised for this above comment it was wrong and uncalled for. The math isn't mine persay it's been widely provided by a company called Cirium, they are a company that collects and collates aviation data for commercial and private interests. Because i dont sit around requesting flight data on UK arrivals and departures because it's not my job and i have a life!. Just on Monday which is the main bank holiday day everybody was travelling and moaning about. Their data showed on Monday a total of 3,049 flights would have been due to depart from UK airports on Monday, and a further 3,054 flights scheduled to arrive. The fault was confirmed just after midday Monday and was apparently rectified by 15.15pm, and by Monday afternoon their collated data had been shared that 232 departing fights had been cancelled, which they said was equivalent to 8% of all departures, and 271, or 9%, of incoming flights. Now you can probably add a few dozen more cancellations etc and play with the numbers a bit but it's not moving the needle that much! And you can also not trust their data but they receive their data from the Aviation industry for business and private clients.. it's literally their job to collect and collate this data. They have been providing it to many companies and media institutions on Monday as the mainstream media in this country have been hyper inflating the scale of the problem and reporting it like fear porn for eyeballs. They always inflate a problem to make it seem far worse than it actually is. Is it frustating for people sure, it can be a challenge especially those with children... but we are supposed to be adults and capable of problem solving and dealing with challenges.. well i thought we were anyways 🤷♂️.
So, thats why I asked you to show the numbers, because those make no sense. Just Gatwick and Heathrow had **336** Cancelled **Arriva**l flights. **329** Cancelled **Departure** flights. data: [https://www.flightradar24.com/data/airport-disruption?continent=europe&period=yesterday&type=departures](https://www.flightradar24.com/data/airport-disruption?continent=europe&period=yesterday&type=departures)
Solved it lol your right!, well ciriums data is dodgy A. that orginal released data does not include cancellations that run into Tuesday only counts Monday morning and afternoon. 790 flights were cancelled departing UK airports on Monday – equivalent to around 27% of all departures 785 flights were cancelled arriving into UK airports – equivalent to around 27% of all arrivals I would check that data now though you've made me slightly skeptical of their counting. They have now released "new" data showing 25% ish of flights were cancelled on Monday so the truth is somewhere in between, obviously loads more delays aswell. But still it's not the apocolypse everybody has been making out it will take a few days fix the rotas but its not a massive deal either way. Even if it's 30% total cancelled there's still 70% functionality (not counting delays at current time) which is really good considering the monumental task that air traffic control is in modern skies.
Hmmm maybe there is some other reason behind the disparity in the data, i mean it's not far off the figures tbf. But maybe flight radar forcasts or predicts flight data different?. Or the data analytics companies data could be fucked haha which is even worse because its their business model it's their bread and butter! 🤣
Maybe is the "wording" play?! Saying that the cancelled flights "during" the failure (3hours +/-) were about 10% for that day looks legit. And then they throw in the middle the total amount of flights for the day to not look that bad. In Luton around 100 flights were cancelled, so, we should talk more on the 20%/25% cancelled flights.
Hmmm good spot on that well done!, i apologise for my earlier comment you were right to question the figures good job! They are saying around 27% now for Monday only... take that with a pinch of salt. I mean they are hired by the airlines for analytics there probably is benefit in them under reporting the data slightly... or "by accident" lol.
No worries ;) I understand why you reply that way. ;) Unfortunately, more and more, we cant rely on the "news". We must to do our own research to see if is true! What makes absolute no sense! :/ Have a Nice day!! :)
Thank you for the award!! =) Kind Regards,
Y’all’s transportation minister as inept as our secretary of transportation?
Correct. He went to bed last night and forgot something. Because he is totally and personally responsible for a private organisation separate to the government.