Air Traffic Control chaos in UK

Another DM sensational scoop, not! Everything seems to be normal to around mins late at Stansted and the skies are full of taking off and landing planes in the UK on flightradar. Any chance to bash the french and other EU countries, they use it and to make evrything seem 100 times worse than it really is. Ryanair to Stansted which turns over the end of my street was on time arriving thismorning and ten mins late leaving but the wind at the moment down here is very strong and could have delayed it a bit.

And what domain would that be, please tell.

Yes, but it’s only when one of them addresses a topic you actually know about that you realise they’re bluffing :slightly_smiling_face: I wonder just how much BS I’ve swallowed from “experts” on the radio over the years.

It’s like using the GPS for a trip to somewhere you already know the best way to. It’s only then you realise the GPS takes you all over the shop. Now, there’s an application for so called artificial intelligence. I took a taxi for a shortish trip last month, non-national driver using GPS there cost €34 (plus tip). Local driver who knew the route on the way back €26 (plus tip). So not immaterial.

:rofl:

https://twitter.com/haveigotnews/status/1696457450981925225

Also Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS), a British professional institution for aerospace engineers and enthusiasts.

And also former Director General of CANSO, the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation, the international trade association for the world’s ANSPs and air traffic management community. He joined CANSO in 2009 following a distinguished aviation career spanning more than 20 years.

Cracker ! :rofl:

Good link Stella. Graham does seem to have a background in Air Traffic Management, and is of an age to be familiar with manual systems :face_with_hand_over_mouth: He’s probably a good choice by the BBC to comment.

Pegasus seems to be a not untypical gathering of loosely affiliated ex-pat retirees (in this case the air industry) using past individual glories (hence vast number of projects) and experience to try and hustle a few bob. And why not :slightly_smiling_face:

I think I may have even met one of them, Bruce Watson, when I was half-heartedly discussing outsourcing Emirates/dnata IT. He or his predecessor/ successor would have been a big stakeholder in any such project. However IMO Emirates/dnata were smart enough to realise that IT was a strategic part of their growth plans, and not just an overhead to be squeezed.

Their IT Director was a certainly very nice man, but isn’t part of this affiliation. He would have been part of the overall Industry ex-pat musical chairs though. Just checked Linkedin and he’s in Oz now :slightly_smiling_face:

Pegasus’s two offices locations are quite interesting.

Fujairah is a remote Emirate with little except maybe diving going for it. We drove through it last year on our way from Ras Al-Khaimah (wall to wall Russians) to Muscat. Maybe a cheap location to commute to Dubai or even Abu Dhabi airports.

Their Irish office is in a nice Dublin suburb, Dalkey, where many pals of mine live and opposite a friend of mine’s restaurant. Since our watering hole, Finnegan’s, is just around the corner I must check out their nameplate as I stagger past at Christmas.

Quite, but SQL injection attacks still work because people do not learn to sanitise their inputs. As xkcd 327 points out

1 Like

Remember that everything in use by government departments is (tick all those that apply):

  • Unfit for purpose, but supplied by friends and family of those requiring it.

  • Supplied by the lowest bidding contractor.

  • Delivered with problems to be resolved by a later, more expensive version of X supplied under a different contract to hide the true cost.

  • Installed, operated and maintained by staff that don’t fully understand the inner workings of X.

  • Never tested properly.

2 Likes

NATS isnt really govt. They have to have systems that are globally compatible, something the UK govt is not capable of.

Well, one can’t argue with that :slightly_smiling_face:

I WhatsApp’d my mole in Eurocontrol……

me: Why did the UK ATM F up?
Him/Her :wink: “because the UK designed and built it themselves with delays in getting it working and it’s failed a few times in the past. They figured an off the shelf system wouldn’t solve their many complex issues. As usual, they made a dog’s dinner of it.

“ Aquila is a joint venture between NATS and Thales responsible for delivering the UK’s Marshall program to transform terminal air traffic management at military airfields.” :scream:

1 Like

Willie Walsh goes after NATS :joy:

The National Air Traffic Services (Nats) has “crucial questions to answer about their responsibility for this fiasco”, according an air industry body.

Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association, called the systems failure “unacceptable”, adding that it was “yet another example of why the passenger rights system isn’t fit for purpose”.

He says airlines would have to pay large disruption costs.

“The UK’s policy makers should take note. The passenger rights system needs to be rebalanced to be fair for all with effective incentives,” he says.

“Until that happens, I fear we will see a continuing failure to improve the reliability, cost efficiency, and environmental performance of air traffic control. The current system does not protect passengers. It hurts them.”

Nats has apologised for the systems glitch and says a “thorough investigation is now under way to understand the root cause of what happened”.

Reuters

Another PPP/Privatisation screw up IMO. Running safe ATM and making a profit don’t sit well together.

Called it!

1 Like

How’s it funded?

It’s in the Wiki article. It was 51% privatised then things went tits up after 9/11 and now it’s convoluted structure.

1 Like

Take back control of our interfaces! Why should our data have to be in a format dictated by bloody foreigners :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

NATS is a public private partnership between the Airline Group, which holds 42%, NATS staff who hold 5%, UK airport operator LHR Airports Limited with 4%, and the Government which holds 49% (the golden share)

Interesting that ‘slasher’ Walsh (whose pennypinching and cuts on cuts reduced BA’s service standards so that it is now below some LCC’s like Jet2 and Easyjet) has lost no time in using this to hit out at the only decent piece of legislation that makes airlines pay at least part of the costs caused by their non-performance, to their passengers.

If airlines are dependent on airports, governments and their own subcontractors, eg for ground handling and luggage, then it is up to them to arrange sufficient performance contractually. Otherwise they are big enough as an industry to self-insure or arrange other backup, insurance, or remedies.

But to go after the rights paengers have is a misdirection and just cheap. Especially as airlines mostly already try to deny compensation the customer is entitled to be paid as provided by EU261 and soon, hopefully, by the US DoT, who are examining improving passengers rights in the US too.

EC261/2004 “EU261” and its (currently still equivalent) version that was enacted in the UK following Brexit.

I read somewhere this morning, sqeasyjet are putting on repatriation flights for people stranded out of UK due to this breakdown. Dont see any others offering.

1 Like

I love Slasher, he’s a hoot. His uncle, who wasn’t much older than him, was part of my team long, long ago.

Willie presented at a conference I attended shortly after he took over at BA. He said one of his first objectives was to slim down the bloated executive ranks. He decided to reduce it by a third and was communicating this at executive round tables across the organisation. Someone let him know that there was some snide tittering behind his back about his Irish accent and his objective of culling a “turd” of the execs. When he found out he decided to solve the accent issue and further improve his bottom line by culling half of them instead :joy:

BTW, he’s a real airline guy, started as a pilot and moved into management. He did a great job in Aer Lingus but was in effect ousted by unions and lazy/incompetent Minister/Department (ministry) for transport. He turned BA around, built IAG then came back and aquired Aer Lingus ten years later… brilliant.

Any airline that pisses off Sarah Vine (or any Mail columnist) is my sort of airline😂

Edit: It’s interesting that little Ireland has produced two of the most successful and influential Airline execs, O’Leary and Walsh (I think the Qantas CEO is Irish as well). During one airline crisis or another I saw Walsh and O’Leary were on Newsnight or the equivalent. O’Leary was the first to speak and launched a typical rant, taking lumps out of BA along the way. I guess the interviewer couldn’t believe his/her (can’t remember which) luck and turned to Walsh for an energetic ripost but all he said was “I wouldn’t pay any attention to all that guff” and delivered his own message with no reference to O’Leary or RyanAir. I remember the camera cut to O’Leary who was tittering away. The two were well matched and they both knew it :face_with_hand_over_mouth: