Well NATS did pretty well to keep things going yesterday. Much like Heathrow, which operates at high capacity day in day out, when something goes wrong, there will be what seems like havoc. The vast majority of flights got away. The problem is, that the small minority is a significant amount of people.
NERL shifts millions of passengers every year with minimal delay, which goes unnoticed. Some other states in Europe do not achieve the same.
The days of manual operations are gone and technology is the only way to enable centres to shift such volumes of traffic. Any backup facility in this scenario, would have only reduced capacity further. Unfortunately, technology does have it occasional drawbacks as anyone with a PC will know.
Last edited by EmergingCyclogenesis; 8th Dec 2013 at 08:30.