An interim report by an independent review panel on England’s air traffic control failure on August 28 2023 has been published by the London based CAA.
The report highlighted a lack of pre-planning and coordination between aviation stakeholders, leading to chaos during the bank holiday period.
The report criticised England[‘s traffic control body NATS for inadequate resilience planning and delays in responding to the ATC failure. The report said: “On the day of the ATC failure, it took over one hour for the on-call engineer to arrive on-site to perform a full system restart because engineers are rostered around routine maintenance tasks. As it was a Bank Holiday, none of these tasks were scheduled.”
The report found the relationships between some aviation sector stakeholders “appears to be adversarial.”
Over 700,000 passengers were impacted, with 300,000 experiencing cancellations and 95,000 facing long delays of more than three hours.
