Computer failure: chaos in the sky of London – The Point

A computer failure in air traffic control Swanwick caused havoc in the British sky for several hours Friday with hundreds of domestic and international flights delayed or canceled.

The British air traffic control Nats announced shortly before 16 pm GMT 30 the end of the fault, leaving hope for a return to normal in the evening. By mid afternoon, Eurocontrol, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, announced the closure of the airspace over London up to 20 hours, Paris time initially.

The first hit Europe Airport

The agency confirmed the restoration of the situation in air traffic control Swanwick, in south-east England in the wake of reassuring news given by Nats. But the disruptions were likely to be significant until late in the evening, especially in the five London airports, Heathrow, Stansted, Gatwick, Luton and City Airport, which were strongly affected by the incident. Heathrow is the first airport in Europe in terms of passengers and first in the world for international passenger traffic.

Other UK airports were also affected, Bristol, Edinburgh and Leeds. For a long time, no plane could not take off from several major airports, including Heathrow. “Stuck on the tarmac at Heathrow Airport. Failure of air traffic control. No flight takes off or lands,” tweeted the passenger, Matt Warren, grounded. The French company Air France announced that fewer than twenty of its flights were affected by the outage, including seven long-haul.

Déjà vu

The company hoped to make some flights from initially canceled. A flight that was scheduled to land in Dublin, had to turn around to return to land in Paris, while already left long haul were “rerouted” in flight. Two flights Iberia of Spain, left Madrid to London, had to turn around. Two other planes were grounded, one in Madrid and one in London.

This is not the first time that a failure of air traffic control Swanwick causes chaos in one of the most congested skies in the world. There is a little more than a year, December 7, 2013, a failure had caused delays and cancellations of hundreds of flights in the UK and Ireland.