Air traffic control— cyber attack?

Scottish/possibly also part of their feed into Atlantic system, supposedly a short glitch,.fixed but will take time for traffic to recover.

Scotland isn't it?

Another one today, which is annoying again as I am due to take people to the airport first thing tomorrow to go back to the UK.

Nope. A tech blip.

As I originally stated, it was a data issue

Preliminary report out:

".... confirmed that this incident was unrelated to the major system outage in August 2023. He also dismissed speculation that it was caused by military intervention.
“This was a software issue in a specific part of our flight data system, that we have traced to a small subsection of coding,” he said. “The issue has been identified and mitigation is in place while a permanent fix is safety tested and deployed.”

https://www.nats.aero/news/nats-publishes-preliminary-report-on-technical-incident-of-8-september/

Thanks for the info.

I've been watching arguments discussions about delays, NATS vs the rest of Eurocontrol in another place..there's a bit of apple v oranges going on.

For example we know French ATC regularly generate delays by industrial action but that's prewarned and can be planned for.

I think feeling is NATS generally do well but when the system really falls over it's obviously with no warning and really catches people out.

BTW looping back to something that came up in earlier debate, I belatedly remembered Liverpool is one of the few UK airports where NATS doesn't supply the local controllers...that might explain what was said on TV, but would have had no bearing on the impact there of the national ATC failure.

You post “……..so I spent the night at the airport. Which was interesting.” @PencilsInSpace
Don’t leave us hanging ! 😀
In what way was it interesting ?

I don't really know what "spurious" flight data can mean.

All the ATC side of a flight plan is is a description of your planned route, in aviation shorthand, and it's often only a line or two of text long...

I've wrote a few and checked more than a few flightplans over the years and as I've always understood it that if you or your operator try and file something in the plan that's garbage/"spurious" the front end of the system kicks the plan into touch without crashing anything.

The 2023 system crash was a case of valid genuine info, not spurious, being on the route in the flight plan but the UK system getting tripped up by duplicate waypoint identifiers....

I guess we might hear a bit more over the next few days or weeks.

Yes apparently. But that's not in the headlines precisely to wind people up and act as click bait.

Well...the failure they had in 2023 sounded darned strange until you looked at the final report...then it looked like a black Swan event, strange but credible. If they've had much the same problem again heads have to roll...

If you need a cure for insomnia the report.for the 2023 event is available via this link;

www.caa.co.uk/data-and-publications/publications/documents/content/cap2993/

Was it a UK military aircraft?

Military aircraft entering 'spurious' flight data blamed for air traffic control meltdown which grounded thousands of planes.

Still reads as a strange story.

Same.

I don't think it's a big leap to think it might have been a cyber attack, but I do think it's a leap to assume it definitely was.

In my experience working in large-scale IT services, the number of service-affecting incidents caused by deliberate attacks is tiny compared to the number caused by other things. I appreciate that the balance will be different for critical national infrastructure, but I'd be really surprised if it's statistically the most likely cause for any organisation.

I got caught up in this coming back from France. 10 1/2 hour delay, about 5 hours of which was sat in the plane on the tarmac. By the time we arrived at Stansted I could just have made the last train into London but it would have been a long slow journey from there on nightbuses and I didn't trust myself to stay awake so I spent the night at the airport. Which was an interesting experience.

I did vaguely wonder if it was the Russians.

I would imagine this is exactly what happened.

ATC is complicated. People (and TV journalists) won't understand that airports mange the approaches and takeoffs up to however many feet and then hand over to the larger centres who manage the traffic higher up and the planes flying through UK airspace and not landing here. So yes, it's entirely possible that a flight leaving Liverpool for Dublin or Glasgow for Belfast could stay within the control of the departure airport until they reach Irish airspace, or something leaving from Gatwick could go south over the channel and be in French airspace quickly. There were planes leaving and arriving during downtime, we live on the flightpath for a UK airport and saw them.

I assumed he didn't write the script he was reading and it wasn't Roger's fault. It's actually a pretty big thing to have got wrong in the context of the piece of news being reported, whoever's mistake it was.

To be fair to the TV presenters they can't be expected to be am expert on everything and TV people do get things wrong.

That sounds feasible, and it also seems clear that Roger had been given a script that made him talk through his backside!

I was watching it on Flightradar for hours and nothing was leaving Liverpool save a couple of flights to Ireland. It was a nightmare, and I really feel for people who were not in a position to pay for their own alternative arrangements up front. Airlines are obliged to provide stranded passengers with assistance, but can’t do that if they don’t bother having representatives at the airport!

Given some of the comments I was beginning to wonder if because of favourable geography some aircraft out of Liverpool were maybe able depart under the eyes of Liverpool ATC, stay below London's coverage, go west, and hop straight into Irish Airspace, filing a flightplan with them just before the airspace boundary..

I'll maybe have a look at Flightradar later to see if there's any evidence of that going on but I'm certainly also seeing talk of at least some cancellations at Liverpool on Tuesday.

Liverpool certainly was not operating as normal - I ended up stranded on a Greek island as the aircraft for my flight couldn’t leave Liverpool.

On a side note, the assistance from the airline was woeful. No alternative flights to rebook through the app as easyJet only fly out there twice a week. No staff in the airport to speak to at all. It’s cost me over £1000 to book alternative flights (and could only get a flight to the opposite end of the country to where I needed to be), accommodation, train tickets etc, not all of which I will be able to claim back I expect. I have insurance but again the wording is tricky when it’s something out of the airline’s control.

I'm amazed anyone would think it is a big leap to think it might have been a cyber attack? Don't people realise that most organisations face cyber attacks regularly, critical infrastructure organisation like NATS will face them every day. They can fend the vast majority of them off.