Air traffic grounded by telephone fault at £623m hi-tech control centre

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/07/flights-grounded-swanick-computer-glitch

Version 0 of 1.

Air traffic controllers at the £623 million state-of-the-art centre at Swanwick have been presented with a completely new problem today.

At the centre of the difficulties at the Hampshire centre is a problem with the telephone system which has prevented controllers making what is normally a smooth transition from night-time to daytime operations.

Officials of air traffic control company National Air Traffic Services (Nats) know what the problem is but now face the task of finding out what caused it.

The centre reduces its operations at night when only a handful of the average 5,000 flights handled by the centre every 24 hours are in the air.

Nats divides the UK airspace into different sectors. Only a few sectors are needed at night and then, as traffic builds up in the early morning, more sectors become operational.

As these sectors grow, so does the number of controllers handling them. What has happened today is that the telephone problem has led to Nats having difficulty reconfiguring the sectors.

Swanwick has had computer glitches before, but this is a problem unconnected with any the centre has previously experienced. As Nats works to overcome the difficutly, bosses are also looking to see if recent changes they have made could have caused today's problem.

Nats was part-privatised in 2001 and the the Swanwick centre opened in January 2002. Nats had a series of software problems at Swanwick in the run-up to the switch to the Hampshire centre from the company's old headquarters at West Drayton in west London.

This meant delays to the starting date which finally became January 2002. It followed one of the largest training programmes in air traffic control history, with each controller spending 170 hours training on the new systems.

There were a number of early glitches in the opening months, but generally the centre, which employs around 1,300 controllers, has worked well.

There were problems in September 2008 when a computer fault led to flight delays. And earlier this year - in July - flights in southern England were delayed due to another problem at Swanwick.

Hampshire had been identified as a possible new centre as early as 1990 and the building at Swanwick was handed over to Nats in November 1994.

The government has a 49% stake in Nats, while the Airline Group, a body that includes a number of UK carriers, has a 41.9% share. Heathrow (formerly BAA) has a 4% stake, with Nats' employees holding 5%.

In the last few weeks, the Universities Superannuation Scheme Limited, one of the largest pension schemes in the UK, announced that it was acquiring a 49.9% non-controlling stake in the Airline Group.

Nats has been operating since 1962 and last year handled 2.1 million flights, carrying some 220 million passengers in the UK.

In the 2012/13 financial year, delays to flights which were attributable to Nats average just 1.4 seconds.

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.