The Day Britain Stopped
I agree with a number of points already made about the inaccuracies in this programme, which certainly caused a great deal of backlash for good reason. More research could have resulted in a much more credible scenario which would have been taken more seriously and may have provoked more thought rather than alienating a whole bunch of people.
This aside, my main concerns relate to the NATS reaction to the programme. One of the messages that has emerged is one that I have heard from NATS before - "we've not had a major accident in 50 years so we must be safe".
This causes me concern because, as I understand it, it is up to any organisation involved in safety related operations to show that they have reduced risk to a point as low as reasonably practicable in their safety case. I know a great deal of safety analysis goes on in the industry, but it seems to me that when that analysis gets hard (like when you demonstrate how reliable a human operator is) the industry falls back on historic data rather than trying to work out how to solve the problem.
The argument that things have been safe for years so all's well is pretty much saying "we've been lucky so far". I somehow doubt that this would count as evidence that risk had been reduced as low as reasonably practicable. If (god forbid) an event like the one televised ever happened, and if something is not done to provide evidence of the current level of safety in the system, then I suspect that the NATS controlling minds would be found guilty of corporate killing.