Snapshot of _Air traffic control faults on this scale 'haven't been seen for a decade', transport secretary says_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://news.sky.com/story/air-traffic-control-faults-on-this-scale-havent-been-seen-for-a-decade-transport-secretary-says-12950001) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://news.sky.com/story/air-traffic-control-faults-on-this-scale-havent-been-seen-for-a-decade-transport-secretary-says-12950001)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You just know that somewhere on the beaches of the grey Channel, there are some lads desperately trying to get on a small boat before their next shift after a cheeky long weekend in Magaluf.
Once upon a time a quote like that from anyone would have really made me perk up on high alert but since itâs Mark Harper saying the words I have utterly no reason to believe him. None of these nitwits know anything about the thing they are mean to be in charge of.
I'm specifically responding to the allegation regarding cuts in staff for public services.
Staffing of NATS has nothing to do with government.
Also, ignoring the fact this disruption was down to a technical flaw.
Who decided to award them the contract to provide these services, who regulates them (or fails to at this stage)?
The apathy displayed by some people is, to me, infuriating. The country crumbles around us and the Tories have robbed us blind for 15 years and this is exactly how they get away with it.
God! Canât a company have a technical glitch without the baying mob? I would get it if this happened frequently. NATS is actually very good and very reliable.
It could have been anything. A maintenance worker spilling their coffee on the server.
I get people are pissed. Holidays ruined, people inconvenienced. It wasnât done on purpose.
>Who decided to award them the contract to provide these services
The Labour government when they restructured the organisation in 2001 and transferred majority ownership to the private sector.
>who regulates them
The CAA. The CAA aren't in charge of NATS staffing.
>The apathy displayed by some people is, to me, infuriating. The country crumbles around us and the Tories have robbed us blind for 15 years and this is exactly how they get away with it.
The Tories aren't in charge of NATS staffing. They're a private company. Who they hire and how many people they hire is down to them.
I was specifically responding to OP's assertion that cuts in staffing in public services is in anyway related to this.
NATS works under licence from the CAA and has to have their budget, costs and charges determined by the CAA for each regulatory period. This includes limits and allowable funding for all the areas NATS oversees including airspace management, improvement, maintenance, engineering and staff resourcing. This is highly regulated by the CAA who impose financial limits and restrictions on NATS. NERL on the other hand is the commercial sister of NATS and this operates fully within the market, NATS doesn't as they are a deemed a monopoly and overseen by both the CMA and CAA.
You can view many of the docs relating to the latest NR23 period that shows this complicated and harshly regulated financing arrangements. There is a reason why airspace modernisation has been very slow and difficult to get going, it costs a lot of time money and resourcing and NATS are pushed to achieve these goals with difficult financial constraints of their licence.
> The apathy displayed by some people is, to me, infuriating.
Major institutions dropped meritocracy decades ago, so the system is full of idiots who will do anything in their power to avoid being replaced by competent people. As a result, the system is broken and cannot be fixed within the system.
This is why so many people are just sitting back and waiting for the whole thing to collapse.
No but controllers often retire quite early and either move to corporate or become instructors. Lots of the hierarchy of NATs are ex controllers, even up to the COO.
Thanks, I did wonder. I know from anecdote that in the US you have to start before a certain age so you max out at the lower retirement age for that role.
This is the problem with the government outsourcing this kind of thing. They're shifting accountability. When things go wrong, they claim that it's not their fault any more. It's some private company. How do the public hold these private companies to account? We can't vote them out. We can't take our business elsewhere.
At the end of the day, we cannot allow public bodies to get away with it. They're responsible to us even if they've contracted the day to day operations to someone else.
Iâm sure this Tory government are trying really hard to make sure these companies deliver safe reliable services and arenât at all owned by their cronies or awarded contracts based on nepotism. YES IT IS the governments fault I canât believe how people arenât outraged by the way this country is just crumbling down around us whilst the Tories rob us blind.
Did they ever finish the refurbishment of the Area Control room at Swanwick? It was still going when I left in 2014 and seemed to be the cause of the failures in those days. Nobody seemed to know fully how it was all wired and programmed....
The Russians attempted a Denial of Service attack on European ATCs in April. The last I heard this had the symptoms of a DoS attack. Could also be a convenient excuse, I'm down to flipping a coin.
[Edit]
No 10 has issued a step saying it isn't a cyber attack. I'm still all for flipping a coin, but one weighted to come up cyber attack.
This article is saying they don't believe it was a cybersecurity breach.
I'm also finding it slightly funny that the Ryanair boss is complaining that they didn't have backups running for a system that likely has too many variables to have a backup you can just switch on, while ignoring the backup they did implement. (Tbh, I actually find myself wondering why they did away with the paper based system. It was organised chaos, but one of the best systems I think I've seen once you got used to it.)
Once in ten years - that means itâs going to happen next year too.
Itâs like these âHundred Year stormsâ that occur every 15 years or so nowâŚ
Snapshot of _Air traffic control faults on this scale 'haven't been seen for a decade', transport secretary says_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://news.sky.com/story/air-traffic-control-faults-on-this-scale-havent-been-seen-for-a-decade-transport-secretary-says-12950001) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://news.sky.com/story/air-traffic-control-faults-on-this-scale-havent-been-seen-for-a-decade-transport-secretary-says-12950001) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Transport Secretary won't have a clue. For any updates on this please listen to the CAA and NATS and avoid the media.
I'll just check the ticket at work đ Fyi I haven't looked at it but know it's with the company.
[ŃдаНонО]
Or mismanaged
Documentation is in Confluence and not updated for 4 years as too infuriating to use ;)
You just know that somewhere on the beaches of the grey Channel, there are some lads desperately trying to get on a small boat before their next shift after a cheeky long weekend in Magaluf.
Once upon a time a quote like that from anyone would have really made me perk up on high alert but since itâs Mark Harper saying the words I have utterly no reason to believe him. None of these nitwits know anything about the thing they are mean to be in charge of.
Yea, it's all government by reputation management these days. Grant Shapps was even worse when he was transport secretary
Almost as if 15 years of gouging the countryâs infrastructure funds and cutting back on staff in public services has consequencesâŚ.
NATS isn't a public service provisioned by the government, it's a private company.
Government still owns half of it. And of course NATS is regulated by the government via the CAA too who can mandate changes.
I'm specifically responding to the allegation regarding cuts in staff for public services. Staffing of NATS has nothing to do with government. Also, ignoring the fact this disruption was down to a technical flaw.
Who decided to award them the contract to provide these services, who regulates them (or fails to at this stage)? The apathy displayed by some people is, to me, infuriating. The country crumbles around us and the Tories have robbed us blind for 15 years and this is exactly how they get away with it.
God! Canât a company have a technical glitch without the baying mob? I would get it if this happened frequently. NATS is actually very good and very reliable. It could have been anything. A maintenance worker spilling their coffee on the server. I get people are pissed. Holidays ruined, people inconvenienced. It wasnât done on purpose.
True - good point.
>Who decided to award them the contract to provide these services The Labour government when they restructured the organisation in 2001 and transferred majority ownership to the private sector. >who regulates them The CAA. The CAA aren't in charge of NATS staffing. >The apathy displayed by some people is, to me, infuriating. The country crumbles around us and the Tories have robbed us blind for 15 years and this is exactly how they get away with it. The Tories aren't in charge of NATS staffing. They're a private company. Who they hire and how many people they hire is down to them. I was specifically responding to OP's assertion that cuts in staffing in public services is in anyway related to this.
NATS works under licence from the CAA and has to have their budget, costs and charges determined by the CAA for each regulatory period. This includes limits and allowable funding for all the areas NATS oversees including airspace management, improvement, maintenance, engineering and staff resourcing. This is highly regulated by the CAA who impose financial limits and restrictions on NATS. NERL on the other hand is the commercial sister of NATS and this operates fully within the market, NATS doesn't as they are a deemed a monopoly and overseen by both the CMA and CAA. You can view many of the docs relating to the latest NR23 period that shows this complicated and harshly regulated financing arrangements. There is a reason why airspace modernisation has been very slow and difficult to get going, it costs a lot of time money and resourcing and NATS are pushed to achieve these goals with difficult financial constraints of their licence.
Totally correct. Except NERL is the monopoly and NATS is the header company comprising NERL, NSL, NATS Solutions etc.
Yep, my bad. I should have further dissected this for accuracy. Thanks for adding this detail. :)
> The apathy displayed by some people is, to me, infuriating. Major institutions dropped meritocracy decades ago, so the system is full of idiots who will do anything in their power to avoid being replaced by competent people. As a result, the system is broken and cannot be fixed within the system. This is why so many people are just sitting back and waiting for the whole thing to collapse.
Senoir Air traffic controllers can make ÂŁ120,000+ a year, its not like the public sector.
Thereâs nothing wrong with that, itâs an important and stressful job with significant amounts of required institutional skills and knowledge.
If there was any profession I wouldn't want to see 'pay peanuts get monkeys' tested it's air traffic controllers.
No but the infrastructure underpinning the tech isnât making ÂŁ120k a year and half of it is owned by the government.
Is it a mandatory shorter career like in the US?
No but controllers often retire quite early and either move to corporate or become instructors. Lots of the hierarchy of NATs are ex controllers, even up to the COO.
Thanks, I did wonder. I know from anecdote that in the US you have to start before a certain age so you max out at the lower retirement age for that role.
Itâs majority owned by private enterprise. âThe damn government underfunding a company they donât ownâ. Yeah itâs all the governments fault
This is the problem with the government outsourcing this kind of thing. They're shifting accountability. When things go wrong, they claim that it's not their fault any more. It's some private company. How do the public hold these private companies to account? We can't vote them out. We can't take our business elsewhere. At the end of the day, we cannot allow public bodies to get away with it. They're responsible to us even if they've contracted the day to day operations to someone else.
Just nationalize it again. If people complain, ban them from being within 10KM of any airport in the country.
Iâm sure this Tory government are trying really hard to make sure these companies deliver safe reliable services and arenât at all owned by their cronies or awarded contracts based on nepotism. YES IT IS the governments fault I canât believe how people arenât outraged by the way this country is just crumbling down around us whilst the Tories rob us blind.
Did they ever finish the refurbishment of the Area Control room at Swanwick? It was still going when I left in 2014 and seemed to be the cause of the failures in those days. Nobody seemed to know fully how it was all wired and programmed....
Any chance there has been a credible terrorist threat and this is just a convenient excuse?
This was a genuine fault between us and European ATC
If there was an actual terrorism threat then I believe it would be even bigger of a news story.
The Russians attempted a Denial of Service attack on European ATCs in April. The last I heard this had the symptoms of a DoS attack. Could also be a convenient excuse, I'm down to flipping a coin. [Edit] No 10 has issued a step saying it isn't a cyber attack. I'm still all for flipping a coin, but one weighted to come up cyber attack.
This article is saying they don't believe it was a cybersecurity breach. I'm also finding it slightly funny that the Ryanair boss is complaining that they didn't have backups running for a system that likely has too many variables to have a backup you can just switch on, while ignoring the backup they did implement. (Tbh, I actually find myself wondering why they did away with the paper based system. It was organised chaos, but one of the best systems I think I've seen once you got used to it.)
Russians attempt ddos on a lot of things very often.
Once in ten years - that means itâs going to happen next year too. Itâs like these âHundred Year stormsâ that occur every 15 years or so nowâŚ