The air traffic control failure that grounded flights and stranded passengers at Bristol Airport for several days from 8 September was triggered by a single military aircraft's flight plan, according to reports citing people briefed on the incident.
A flight plan submitted by a UK military aircraft introduced what insiders described as "spurious" data into the flight-processing system run by National Air Traffic Services (NATS), setting off a chain of technical failures that shut down parts of the network for several hours, the Financial Times reported, as cited by the Mirror and GB News on Thursday evening.
NATS operations director Kathryn Leahy told industry bosses about the source of the fault during a briefing on the evening of the outage, an insider told the Financial Times. Four people briefed on the incident said the flight plan triggered the sequence of events that led to chaos at airports across the country, including Bristol, Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Manchester and Birmingham.
The Ministry of Defence declined to comment, and sources stressed that the military origin of the flight plan was not itself considered responsible for the failure, GB News reported. Investigators are instead focused on why the system was unable to handle the data safely.
More than 2,000 flights were cancelled across the UK network within three days of the fault, with Bristol Airport passengers among those affected by delays and cancellations that took several days to clear. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has told the House of Commons she believes the disruption was avoidable, a