The meltdown of the UK’s air traffic control system last August, which impacted over 700,000 passengers, was originally caused by the failure to process flight plan data from just a single flight from Los Angeles to Paris.

The UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) appointed an Independent Review Panel to produce an interim report into the incident. During the investigation, it was found that it took around 90 minutes for an engineer to arrive on-site to perform the necessary restart of the air traffic control system, further compounding the delays faced by passengers. As it was a bank holiday, the engineers were working from home and were not permitted to perform the restart remotely.

Airlines planning to operate flights through controlled airspace are routinely required to file a flight plan containing information such as aircraft type, speed and routing.

But both the primary and secondary systems for the central air traffic control system failed to process data for the Los Angeles to Paris...