I saw the Scottish GM at CTC yesterday! I bet he went north sharpish!
This is the failure which is supposed never to happen. Because the OES cannot be relied upon, all NATS critical systems are supplied from uniterruptible power supplies. ie the OES keeps the batteries charged and they feed inverters which power the equipment for a certain length of time. This time is determined as being sufficient to safely clear the skies of all traffic in the event that the generators fail to start which would keep the batteries charged until the OES comes back.
Obviously something didn't work very well!
A I
