Air traffic control— cyber attack?

So Northwest Tonight said Liverpool continued to fly the whole time because it has is own ATC system.

Which begs the question why the national system is not compartmentalised so that one rogue bit of data doesn't bring the entire country's airports except Liverpool to a standstill.

Got an early start tomorrow to make sure himself gets on the rebooked plane, I really need a few days home alone!

Once upon a time Medium/high level ATC actually was slightly more compartmentalised than it is now, back in the days when skies were less busy and aircraft were slower, but that doesn't work well anymore, but I'll come back to that.

I'm not sure what point the TV report was trying to make but Liverpool isn't special, all airports have their own ATC system at the (literally) local level to handle the controlling of aircraft on the ground and (usually) within a few thousand feet/handful of miles of the airport, where high speeds aren't involved and distances don't get covered quickly...those controllers manage the local box of air..

Problem is go beyond the local area and as aircraft get higher up speeds usually increase, ground get covered more quickly and a more centralised system makes more sense with controllers looking after large sectors of airspace, not little local boxes.

Crossing England at high level a pilot might only need to switch controllers and radio frequencies half a dozen times...which reduces everyone's workload, improves safety, certainly helps with coordination.

It also helps if everyone on the ground side is in the same building...even going way back ,1960s, England and Wales only used to have two main ATC centres, London and Preston, but it's been London alone for a long time (that's now physically at Swanwick), Scotland has it's own centre for medium/high level traffic.

However whats being missed in some of the commentary about yesterday is that the problem wasn't one of radars not working or controllers not having comms, it was a problem that the flight planning system somehow wasn't accepting flight plans for flights originating out of some of the southern airports...and flight plan handling systems by their nature can't be too compartmented, data has to be shared across ATC centres and airports.

What is also maybe important to note is that London ATC was still happily handling those flights they did have flight plans for e.g. overflights of England and Wales, and those flights inbound to southern UK airports (until parking space ran out.).

I wasn't suggesting it should run compartmentalised all the time. As a person who used to design systems it puzzles me why a data problem in a geographic area is allowed to bring the entire skies of the UK, except it seems Liverpool, to a standstil and be unable to fence off the rogue geographic area.

That was exactly my thought

What happens is that if a flight plan shows conflicting information, the system shuts down the skies because there is a flight which lacks predictability. That is not the system 'failing '' that is the system operating correctly and prioritising safety over convenience.Moreover it isnt really NATS who are at fault here.

Morning,

I'd be interested to see what really went on at Liverpool, not the TVs version of it, but in any event the entire skies of the UK weren't brought to a standstill..(see my comments about overflights and inbounds).

I suspect it may become clearer when we start hearing an explanation from NATS, but I think it's fair to point out ATC systems worldwide work along the lines of the UK one, with very large swaths of medium/high level controlled airspace being run out of one centre.

Thanks everyone for the interesting explanations of how this works! Hope everyone gets home safe and soon.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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 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 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.

Same.

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.

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/

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

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.

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 ?