Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – A software error lasting "one millisecond," and not sabotage as previously suspected, caused the chaos in British air traffic on September 8, disrupting air traffic and grounding thousands of aircraft. This is the conclusion of a preliminary investigation conducted by NATS, the UK's main air traffic control provider, which concluded that the software flaw compromised data and thus flight information updates, necessitating restrictions to limit air traffic in the name of safety.
The problem only affected flights in the London area control centre, but restrictions had to be imposed across the UK to allow the National Aerospace System (NAS), which underpins the management of UK airspace, to restart.
The investigation ruled out a cyber attack by a hostile entity or an act of sabotage, the National Air Traffic Control Service (NATS) said.
The technical problem, which caused the cancellation of 2,000 flights and disrupted hundreds of thousands of trips, raised concerns about Nats' systems, so much so that some have called for the resignation of its CEO, Martin Rolfe.
"This was a software issue in a specific part of our flight data system, which we traced to a small subsection of the code," Rolfe explained. "The issue has been identified and corrective measures have been implemented while the final fix is tested and implemented," he added.
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