Chaos at the airport is made worse by password problems

An engineer’s password problem hampered efforts to resolve Bank Holiday airport chaos caused by a flight data error, a report said.

More than 700,000 passengers were faced with cancellations and delays in August 2023 due to the failure of computers at NATS, the British air traffic control service.

The engineer was unable to reset the system from home and arrived at work more than three hours after the incident began, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said.

NATS said it would review its resilience plans and had ensured the mistake could not happen again.

A one-way flight from Los Angeles to Paris caused the failure on Monday, August 28 CAA report confirmed.

Air traffic control systems handling the flight were confused by a duplicate code – DVL – representing both Deauville in France and Devil’s Lake in North Dakota, US.

The fault was discovered at 8.30am BST at NATS headquarters in Swanwick, Hampshire, which contacted the engineer 30 minutes later, the report said.

However, it said that “the level 2 engineer’s password credentials could not be easily verified due to the architecture of the system,” which was not restored until 2:30 p.m.

More than 2,000 flights were canceled on August 28 and 29, leading to “chaotic conditions” at crowded airports, the CAA said.

It said the total cost of the incident to passengers and airlines was between £75 million and £100 million.

A list of recommendations states that NATS should review its arrangements to manage significant disruption, as well as communications with airlines, remote working policies and software.

EasyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren said: “The report makes it clear once again that airlines and passengers have been seriously let down by NATS due to its lack of resilience and planning.

“Airlines then had to pick up the pieces and incur costs, which ran into the millions.”

The air traffic control system had previously processed more than 15 million flight plans without seeing the scenario.

A NATS spokesperson said: “We would like to apologize again for any inconvenience caused to passengers as a result of this very unusual technical incident.

“Our own internal research has produced 48 recommendations, most of which we have already implemented; these include improving our engagement with our aviation and airport customers, our broader response to contingencies and crises, and our technical support processes.

“We have resolved the specific issue that caused the problem last year as our first priority and it cannot happen again.”

Transport Secretary Louise Haigh said: “The NATS IT outage last year was an unprecedented event that we all hope will never happen again.

“My department will seek to implement reforms whenever possible to provide air travelers with the highest possible level of protection.”

Under the Conservative government, the Department for Transport set out plans to give the CAA “stronger enforcement powers” in June last year, but no legislation on the issue was introduced to Parliament.

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