Originally Posted by
eglnyt
The failure was foreseen and the impact correctly assessed but the controls expected to contain such a failure didn't work as expected.
It's always a bit tricky for systems like this because of the interaction between flow regulation to maintain safety and the business impact that results from that regulation.
Any engineer worth their salt expects failure, as you can never say, “My great design will never fail” E.g. even the most solid bridge can fall down one day. What you don’t know is which of the many possibilities that theoretically occur once in 1000 years may crop us in 10 years’ time. For software if you knew exactly what could happen it’s likely you could change the code to eliminate it.
What is less certain is how the backup plan worked this time. It looks to me like the normal backup plan of manual operation, whilst safe, went a bit awry in this case as the impact was longer lasting. Or was it just that being a bank holiday, with its high pax volumes, delays were longer?
I fail to see how parliament can really help here. NATS is semi-private and semi-controlled by the UK airlines. Unless government said “Here is £1b to build a duplicate system or lets structure NATS in a completely different way” it’s up to the airlines to decide how much NATS spends to upgrade its systems and pass that cost back to the airlines and customers through the route charges. Neither government (even a Labour one) nor the airlines are likely to agree to say £1b when NATS operations are actually amongst the most reliable in the world. Especially as the ATCOs don’t go on strike, unlike many others.
By the way, a week on, have all the pax that were delayed got alternative flights now?