AirportsUK has responded to NATS report on its flight planning system failure of 2023

Credit: AirportsUK

AirportsUK has responded to NATS’ recent report on the major failure of its flight planning system on 28 August 2023.

Karen Dee, chief executive of AirportsUK, the trade body for UK airports, said regarding the final report on the NATS outage of August 2023:

“As the report makes clear, this outage had the biggest impact on aviation operations since the 2010 Icelandic volcanic eruption.

“It is therefore a testament to how hard airports worked in the days that followed to return operations to normal as quickly as possible.

“Airports will continue to keep all of their procedures under review, as they do at all times to ensure they serve passengers well and provide them with the most positive travel experience. We’ll also continue to work with the whole aviation sector so that incidents such as this are minimised in future.”

Details of the NATS report

Following the major failure of NATS (NERL) flight planning system on 28 August 2023, an Independent Panel was set up by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to review the incident and its causes, and to recommend improvement measures.

Following the publication of the Panel’s interim report, on 14 March 2024, this document contains the Panel’s final report and recommendations. The Panel members’ short biographies are detailed at Appendix A, and the scope of the Panel’s Terms of Reference (TORs) is appended to this report as Appendix B. The Panel members bring a wide-ranging and relevant set of skills and experiences but are independent of any individual stakeholder. The Panel was established and began its inquiry in October 2023.

The Panel’s interim report focussed on the failure, its immediate causes, and timeline. A number of further lines of enquiry were identified. In this final report, the Panel presents a more detailed description of the failure itself, and focusses on longer-term and systemic issues which its work has uncovered, making a number of recommendations for future improvements.

The impact of the failure was considerable. The CAA has estimated that there were over 700,000 passengers and others who were affected by the failure, often for several days, and this had considerable financial and emotional consequences for them. The Panel has commissioned consumer research which describes some of the experiences of passengers, and this is published alongside this report.1 In pursuing its work, the Panel has been motivated to draw lessons from the incident which may help the prevention of future incidents, or at least to reduce the scale of the impact on consumers, airlines, airports, and others should they occur.

Based on the information provided by the airlines most affected by the incident, the Panel has estimated that the costs to airlines were approximately £65m. In addition, substantial costs were incurred by passengers, airports, tour operators, insurers, and others. The Panel was unable to accurately quantify these costs. It is likely that the total cost was in the region of £75m to £100m.

Check out the full report here.