Radar problem caused mayhem in UK skies on Wednesday Airlines canceled more than 100 flights across the UK on Wednesday after a "technical issue" with radar systems left air traffic controllers flummoxed. Air traffic in London, Edinburgh, and other UK airports was severely disrupted, the UK's National Air Traffic Services (NATS) warned. Passengers faced long delays while planes …
"It looks like David Gunson's 'What goes up might come down' after dinner speech prediction came true. Who pulled the 13 amp plug out!"
Reading this article I felt the urge to go listen to it again. For anyone wanting a laugh while working- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KbUNzi58wM
NATS is based at Swanwick.
And also in the ATC field, is Shanwick Oceanic Control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanwick_Oceanic_Control
The name Shanwick is a portmanteau of Shannon and Prestwick.
Looks like the operator pushed the "Radar-be-Gone" button by accident. LOL. monty python at work.
At least they didn't go for the British Telecom fiber outage theory (like they did in Italy, blaming last month's Turin ATC North Italy sector outage on TiM, and Philadelphai ATC blamed "Verizon" for EWR airport outage.....
What happened to this radar...
https://nats.aero/blog/2014/12/end-era-iconic-heathrow-landmark/
That was in 2014 - it may in turn have been replaced at Lowther Hill... by a "3D Primary Surveillance Radar system that is able to mitigate against the impact of wind turbines
https://www.nats.aero/news/nats-deploys-new-radar-system-to-unlock-further-renewable-energy/
The lack of resilience in UK plc infrastructure is a massive problem. Profit is keeping a small number of airports disproportionately busy while regional airports twiddle their thumbs. Central government should look at ways to rebalace this so no airport operates at or near capacity under normal circumstances, and can handle the unexpected without everything falling apart. We stress test banks so why not airports.
Profit is keeping a small number of airports disproportionately busy...
counting the money from drop-off charges
The lack of resilience in UK plc infrastructure is a massive problem. Profit is keeping a small number of airports disproportionately busy while regional airports twiddle their thumbs.
And also poor use of existing resource. Apparently the private sector is efficient but this seems to be a lie.
Instead of getting on with HS2 (which will unlock lots of local rail capacity, but also create a fast spine between Heathrow and Manchester Airport, and later East Midlands), they're prevaricating around building a third runway at Heathrow.
Offloading domestic flights (like the Manchester-Heathrow shuttles) to HS2 shuttles (which would give you about the same travel time) would unlock runway capacity at both airports, so you could have more international flights out of Manchester (and other regional airports), reducing our over-reliance on the London area as well as easing Heathrow's capacity constraints.
And of course if you got HS2 hooked up to HS1 and built international platforms at Birmingham & Manchester, you could nix all the short-haul flights to Amsterdam/Brussels/Paris, further releasing airport capacity for longer hauls.
But no, we won't do the sensible thing. We'll do nothing, but spend a great deal of money on viability studies for the wrong thing.
It seems to me that the sheer volume of flights these days is completely crazy. Humans flying all over the place for no valid reason other than a desire to spend one week somewhere other than their own house ! Really ? The tourism business is the problem, and while the concept of travel for such delights is very nice the price now seems to be beyond our control. Making flights more expensive might be a good way to trim the numbers, but while we all recognize that we want freedom to do exactly as we fancy at any minute of the day, it's not really very feasible in the end. The controls we put on other things might now need to be put on travel or do we just have to accept a higher risk factor for all these flying machines ? The maps showing flights in the air is mind blowing !!! If a flight is absolutely necessary for a business or humanitarian reason so be it, but otherwise.......stay home people !
It's the frequent fliers that are the problem. Increasing costs for everyone penalises those that save up for one holiday abroad a year without disincentivising those that fly for work every few weeks. APD could be linked to a passport number and ramped up for every flight taken within a 12 month period (if it's your third flight in the last 12 months, pay 3 x the APD charge). That would encourage people to "save" their flights for something special and avoid them when other transport was available or Teams could be used.
Nice idea in theory, not so nice however if the flights that push you over the limit are all being paid for by your employer, and then the one flight you actually *want* to be doing that year (jetting off for a much needed holiday) is one that stings *you* for an inflated APD charge despite all of those prior flights being forced on you... Because you can be damn certain that any employer willing to force its minions to fly around the world rather than deal with things remotely, is also going to be the sort of employer who laughs in your face if you then ask for compensation because the things they've required you to do now mean you're personally on the hook for expenses you wouldn't have incurred otherwise.
The volumes are crazy.
“Tourism” as such isn’t an inherent problem though. Nothing wrong with travel, meeting new people and broadening one’s mind.
It just doesn’t need to be by plane.
Paris could be a mere 12hours from Istanbul if you built High Speed Rail between them, which is an ideal sleeper service. Travel overnight instead of losing out “travel days” at either end of your holiday. There’s basically no reason for short-haul flights in Europe. We could do it all with rail - more journeys for <10% the carbon emissions.
Domestic aviation ought to be banned post haste (yeah yeah, barring oddball exceptions for Highlands and Islands, and very remote communities where flying makes more sense than surface (but with proportionally small volumes).
Bump off the frequent fliers, and tax private jets into oblivion.
When I fly - once a year at most - I get a tinge of guilt. But then I remember that jetsetters match my annual carbon footprint every day. When the 1% are accounting for half the emissions, I refuse to feel too guilty about the odd excursion. Which is a bit nihilistic, but also… it’s not politically or socially sustainable for the 99% to be propping up the 1% lifestyle indefinitely.
I would go further and replace Heathrow with a brand new fit-for-purpose hub airport somewhere along HS2 that could also be a Eurostar terminus and a new home for the UK government, all funded by building Heathrow Village to help London's housing shortage.
Better use of assets could be encouraged by varying APD according to the capacity of the airport. Airports running at over 90% should pay much higher APD than those sitting almost empty. That would rebalance things almost overnight.
I'd also boost Heathrow's capacity for economically valuable passengers by whacking a massive tax on transit passengers. There's no value for UK plc to have people fly in just to fly out again. It might be justifiable if there was spare capacity but right now these passengers are taking up slots that could be used for new destinations that would see more people starting and ending their journeys in the UK - passengers that would actually boost growth. The loss of transit passengers would hit individual airlines but not UK plc.
Not sure it's private sector inefficiency at play here, so much as private sectors being hamstrung by planning restrictions, endless consultations, appeals, redesigns, shifting of goalposts etc. that invariably burden any such large-scale public development like HS2, 3rd runway etc.
Not suggesting we should tear up the rulebook and just allow such developments to, literally, bulldozer their way to completion ASAP, but it does increasingly feel as if we're now so focussed on ensuring everyone has their say and their opinions heard/taken into consideration, that the costs (financially, time etc.) incurred in getting stuff done is now massively out of proportion to what those costs could otherwise be. So it feels like some level of rebalancing is required, such that we don't just give developers carte blanche to do whatever they want, but also don't then give so much power to everyone else to hinder development that nothing ever gets done, or only eventually gets done after massive cost increases and/or significant reductions between what's actually delivered vs what was originally planned.
IIRC the Gov has already brought in new rules for "strategic projects/infrastructure" whereby they can override local council objections and/or some other levels of objections. But well heeld protestors can still delay things for years right up the the supreme court, often on tiny little legal issues. ISTR and issue a few years ago where protected species were claimed to be in an area and it turned out none of the locals had any knowledge of this species being there and the protestors had either made it up or imported them into the area. I can't find a reference to it now, so it could just be my failing memory and not true at all.
The resilience was there, just not hot failover. They did cut over to a back up system.
Apparently the radar feed was unavailable for 20 minutes, which is probably how long it takes to work out where the problem is, then make a decision about what to do and actually complete the failover and check that everything was operating as it should. At that point a backlog has built up magnifying the effect of the outage.
Another problem is that the airlines want all the reslience to be someone else's problem. LHR and LGW run virtually at maximum capacity. If they ran at, say, 80% then a radar outage in the morning wouldn't mess their schedule up for the whole day. The airlines could keep some spare crews and aircraft handy and it would be much less of a problem. The airlines, of course, wouldn't stand for the extra cost of slots (to make up for fewer flight) and the cost of their own hot switchover aircraft.
I don't believe airlines are that bothered about costs as long as all their competitors face the same costs. Paying a bit more for slots if airports kept some spare capacity to cope when things go wrong would benefit airlines given the wider risk to their global schedules. The real problem is these airports are businesses not government run critical infrastructure assets. That means all decisions are made with shareholders in mind, and UK Plc isn't a shareholder. Insurance can cover unforeseen disruption caused by third parties like exploding substations or rebooting radars so why should shareholders lose income by not maxing out the slots or paying for resilient power supplies? There's a reason why most governments keeps control of their airports.
We don’t need more traffic and expansion at LHR/LGW.
Move the traffic North… and save millions of unnecessary journeys South to congested and stupid expensive Londonshire.
Reopening a recently built mothballed airport seems a pretty good first step…. With immediate capacity for 25m passengers and 1/4m tons of cargo ….
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwynne050exo.amp
This won't work without tweaking APD to encourage airlines to make better use of quieter airports. Teesside Airport was recently saved by taxpayers but still only has a handful of flights per day because it's difficult to break out of the cycle that costs per pax are higher at less busy airports, which remain less busy because costs per pax are higher. But imagine if APD was zero-rated at any airport running below 50% capacity - airlines would be queueing up to move some flights from the busiest airports.
Seems a far more cost effective and timely solution than £bn’s of unnecessary construction expenditure, tearing up the M25 and locale around LHR and likely breaches of pollution guidelines. (And smaller Londonshire expansions at LLU and STN).
Even a 5-10 year moratorium on it as you suggest to do the rebalancing exercise. I’d suggest doubling it at busy to offset quiet airport discounts. APD has a defined purpose … it’s not a general tax bucket filler like fuel duty.
Alas lobbying by the big airport groups is going to override common sense.
Increasing APD it at busier airports makes sense, as does a ten-year time limit otherwise there may be unintended consequences such as airports expanding just to meet the threshold. The policy would likely eliminate itself as regional airports become busier and lose the discount although but by then they should have the economies of scale to be able to compete fairly with the larger airports.
More widely APD is supposed to be an environmental tax and not a general revenue raiser as you say, so it should also consider other environmental factors like the efficiency of the plane. Clearly newer planes could pay less than older planes, but are some models cleaner than others per-passenger mile? Is it better to fly one big plane than two smaller planes on a busy route? What about penalising surface travel time to discourage people driving 8 hours for £9 tickets. How about pre-emptively zero-rating zero-carbon planes to encourage their development.
Government absolutely should be putting the UK's economic resilience and the environment ahead of big airport group profits.
Coventry Airport also still available for use - formerly for a few years used by Thomson/TUI Fly and another potential site for a UK Battery Hu
… as for some inexplicable reason JLR have chosen the automotive backwater of Somerset for their UK Battery Gigafactory. Not literally across the road from their Global HQ, 10 miles from their Gaydon Test site, 10 miles from their Solihull factory and 20 miles from the Castle Bromwich plant.
A £500m bung from the last Tory Government and Bridgewater and surrounding areas being Tory voting are entirely coincidental. Levelling up in action.
It's unlikely to have been a radar-equipment problem. Multiple airports were affected so it wasn't a terminal radar failure and there's overlapping coverage over mainland UK for surveillance/en-route radars so I'd guess it was either a network problem getting the information to Swanwick or an equipment/software problem at Swanwick preventing them getting a radar picture.
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