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Travel chaos after radar failure closes UK airspace, grounding flights and leaving thousands facing severe delays
Airports including Heathrow and Gatwick were affected by the outage, with travel hubs as far north as Edinburgh reporting that flights had been grounded shortly after 4pm UK time. Eurocontrol, the EU-wide air traffic control agency, reported that the London control area was “temporarily unavailable due to technical issues”. As thousands of travellers faced cancellations, an update by NATS - a national air traffic control agency - provided more positive news, with the organisation stating that… (www.lbc.co.uk) More...
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That happened to me in 2000. Connection in Heathrow (started in Goteborg, Sweden, dropping off my Europea Delivery Volvo) We landed but nothing was taking off, and I was told by United "We can't help you, come back tomorrow." I had been talking to a guy who started in London. He said, "The hotel I stayed at last night has room, I'm going back there." So we shared a cab. The only good news was I got to watch most of the soccer game where England beat Germany for the first time in something like 30 years. That was a total Charlie-Foxtrot, I did good to get out of the airport and into a hotel.
And we thought that the FAA has problems! Seriously though, people just do not and cannot understand the complexity of ATC and what all is involved to keep it running at 100% efficiency and safely. It is an enormous undertaking! We all are in the business of aircraft, and should know that best of all.
Air traffic across Europe, and North America for that matter, operates at almost maximum capacity and this is just one more incident that proves a comparatively short term issue has massive consequences that can take many hours/days to resolve.
I doubt that there are any short term fixes and it will take massive funding to build in the required 'slack' that the system needs. Given the current state of the UK economy, and the ongoing economic concerns globally, the likelihood of such funding becoming available is probably about zero.
I doubt that there are any short term fixes and it will take massive funding to build in the required 'slack' that the system needs. Given the current state of the UK economy, and the ongoing economic concerns globally, the likelihood of such funding becoming available is probably about zero.
Maybe Ryanair could temporarily assign Neal McMahon to NATS to constructively improve the system for their benefit and all crew and passengers.
Why would he resign? He is doing the job that he is being paid to do - put people off travelling by air by messing up air travel almost every year and causing suffering to families. He will get an honour in due course
As for me I haven't Ride Air Plain due to that no experience on saying anything.
