Flight disruption 'not caused by any incorrect actions' - report

A software defect, not operator mistakes, was found to have triggered last week’s air traffic disruption in the UK that led to more than 2,000 flight cancellations. National Air Traffic Services (Nats) published a preliminary 18-page investigation report on Friday into an incident on September 8. Nats said the fault occurred “in the space of a millisecond” in software that allocates codes to individual aircraft for radar identification. The issue caused flights in and out of the UK to be cancelled, affecting hundreds of thousands of passengers, with disruption continuing into the next day. Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe said the problem was not linked to a 2023 Nats outage or a July 2023 radar issue.