Mail hacks are working tirelessly to find a way to blame this on the EU.
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Or Brexit 
Seems they couldn’t pin this on the EU so, predictably, had to go with the next best thing…
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The Times are reporting the same story, it seems NATS and the government know what caused the problem but won’t make that public.
Typical stupid journalism… doesn’t actually accuse… mere (innocently) asks the question…
Did blunder by… blah blah blah ?? Might have blah blah blah…
Aaaaargh…
But the BBC seems to be more up-to-date… just one hour ago…
Graham Lake, an aviation strategy consultant, told BBC Radio 4 PM: "What we have is a system failure that’s caused a revert to a manual system [that] has a much lower capacity for processing aircraft, and so the only way you can keep it safe is to stop aircraft taking off.
“You can’t stop the ones that are already airborne, but you stop the ones still on the ground until you’ve identified and remedied the fault.”
He said the technical fault was “extremely rare”, with the last one being in 2014.
Assuming it was caused by wrongly-formatted data it’s interesting to see who gets blamed by the UK press… a Johnny Foreigner airline employee for having fat fingers or the Brits for not implementing data validation and sanitisation.
Even if there was a wrongly submitted flight plan by a French airline it’s crazy that it immediately affected the whole system.
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Programmer humour…
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I was supposed to be returning my grandson to the uk from Limoges yesterday and we arrived at the airport just as the chaos began.
Fortunately Ryanair cancelled quickly so we weren’t waiting around for long and I’ve managed to book us for Wednesday, fingers crossed.
Grandson, 11, said driving there and back without flying anywhere was the worst 3 hours of his life. I really hope he is so truly blessed.
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OMG!!!
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I told you so To be honest it really pisses me off it’s so predictable 
So first of all, if this was the cause why, given the number of flight plans that are submitted each day, hasn’t it happened before? The real question is what system change was made by who and when? That’s how most of these system failures are fixed and the reason prudent folk never make two changes at the same time (apart from significant system upgrades which have gone through an appropriate level of system testing).
Secondly, no “input” no matter how “incorrect” or how “entered” by whatever means should ever be able to crash a system. The idea that it could, without there being an inherent, serous system deficiency is ludicrous IMEO (in my expert opinion 
). All data input must be validated, even if transferred through systems interfaces. Otherwise the system has no integrity.
Of course they know what caused the problem, otherwise they couldn’t have “fixed” it or declared the system safe again. Probably a programmer working for buttons in a Bangalore sweatshop owned by Sunak’s father in law cut corners (at management’s insistance) and put a dodgy patch into production under fear of being fired. (wouldn’t be the first time).
“ Graham Lake, an aviation strategy consultant” Bit of a vague title. All he seems to have done is parrot the fallback procedure. I doubt he knows anything about the actual application.
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he knows enough about it to NOT blame France… which makes him reasonably knowledgeable in my book… 
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Please don’t think I am criticising, I am not, but if you knew yesterday was a UK Bank Holiday (I didn’t btw) why on earth did you choose it for him to travel? It is almost a given that something will block the overloaded system.
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I actually booked the flight 3 months ago and only realised it was a bank holiday last week.
Anyway lesson learned, check for bank holidays in future.
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I’d say he knows more about the reliability of the Daily Mail than the internal workings of flight plan management systems.
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Ah yes, I see, I only found out on the day when someone on the radio mentioned it.
Although I can understand hard working people in the UK jumping at the chance of a holiday I can barely understand why so many choose to fly somewhere.
You couldn’t get me in a plane if it came with an extra pension but when I lived in England I never, ever, travelled on a BH. Nor here either come to that.
No doubt a common or garden talking head for hire, who can say some vaguely technical words on demand.
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Hah, fair enough, someone who looks like their still current. Unlike my domain, where they’re usually long-retired, relatively junior ranked but still using their rank to gain credibility.