LNW-GW Joint
Veteran Member
The independent report on this major ATC outage has been published.
It led to many cancellations and delays as a result of ATC being only able to operate in manual mode, around 10% of normal, for a period of 6 hours.
Apart from being very interesting of itself, it is relevant to other major transport outages such as major rail incidents.
The incident was not under the control of airlines, so while the duty of care provisions for delay and cancellation under EU261 were applicable (eg rebooking, refreshments, accommodation), the wider compensation provisions were not.
The customer impact was considerable, with 700K passengers affected by cancellations and delays over several days, despite the original problem being fixed in 6 hours.
The report has few statistics on customer impact, as it proved impossible to obtain the details from the airlines.
As a result the examples given are largely from the media coverage of the event.
Overall, it's estimated that the event cost to the industry was between £75-100 million.
It isn't clear what the total cost to the passengers were; some are still waiting for reimbursement of costs.
Another interesting snippet was that the software in question was from Austrian/German firm Frequentis Comsoft.
The specific issue on the day was the presentation of flight plans including two waypoints with the identical code DVL.
DVL refers to Deauville in France, which was the one intended for the Los Angeles-Paris flight in question, but is also the code for Devil's Lake, North Dakota.
The clash caused the ATC software to go into maintenance mode, and the backup system did the same 20 seconds later.
The software supplier was able to remove the offending flight plan to allow the resumption of full ATC service.
It led to many cancellations and delays as a result of ATC being only able to operate in manual mode, around 10% of normal, for a period of 6 hours.
Apart from being very interesting of itself, it is relevant to other major transport outages such as major rail incidents.
The incident was not under the control of airlines, so while the duty of care provisions for delay and cancellation under EU261 were applicable (eg rebooking, refreshments, accommodation), the wider compensation provisions were not.
The customer impact was considerable, with 700K passengers affected by cancellations and delays over several days, despite the original problem being fixed in 6 hours.
The report has few statistics on customer impact, as it proved impossible to obtain the details from the airlines.
As a result the examples given are largely from the media coverage of the event.
Overall, it's estimated that the event cost to the industry was between £75-100 million.
It isn't clear what the total cost to the passengers were; some are still waiting for reimbursement of costs.
Another interesting snippet was that the software in question was from Austrian/German firm Frequentis Comsoft.
The specific issue on the day was the presentation of flight plans including two waypoints with the identical code DVL.
DVL refers to Deauville in France, which was the one intended for the Los Angeles-Paris flight in question, but is also the code for Devil's Lake, North Dakota.
The clash caused the ATC software to go into maintenance mode, and the backup system did the same 20 seconds later.
The software supplier was able to remove the offending flight plan to allow the resumption of full ATC service.
