Air traffic control chaos may have been caused by controller who put too many dots in a flight plan request

Airport chaos which left thousands of passengers stranded may have been caused by a simple typo. The widespread disruption which started on Monday (August 28) is understood to have been caused by a single rogue flight plan and resulted in days of cancelled flights in airports across the UK.

Controllers need basic information on each flight to populate their display, such as the flight number, aircraft type, destination and route. One expert said a spacing error or too many dots on a flight plan could have confused the system, while another said a “duplicate” flight plan could be a plausible explanation.

Michele Robson, who has worked in air traffic control for more than 20 years, told Sky News: “It’s a very old system, it’s been running for many years and generally we’ve been very lucky and we don’t often have failures, or if we do, we get it back during that back-up time, which is what it’s there for.

“There have been other instances where something has been incorrectly formatted and the flight plan computer behaves in a way they’re not expecting and effectively causes it to fail, so that could be enough to potentially crash the system in effect if it was formatted incorrectly.

“You have to space things in a certain way using a certain number of dots, as an example. They do it in a very unique way that’s never been done before, otherwise it would happen every day.

“So it has to be something pretty unusual that they’ve input for it to happen, but it’s an old system and perhaps something was input that it’s never seen before and that’s what caused it to have this reaction where it’s failed.”

Airlines are demanding compensation reform and want National Air Traffic Control Services (NATS) to shoulder the cost of this week’s airport chaos. They are urging the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to review the compensation system and make the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) contribute to the cost.