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Comment by pimterry | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, the article suggests early on that sometimes these plans are being processed for flights already in the air (although at least 4 hours away from the UK).

If you can stop the specific problematic plane taking off then keeping the system running is fine, but once you have a flight in the air it's a different game.

It's not totally unreasonable to say "we have an aircraft en route to enter UK airspace and we don't know when or where - stop planning more flights until we know where that plane is".

If you really can't handle the flight plan, I imagine a reasonable solution would be to somehow force the incoming plane to redirect and land before reaching the UK, until you can work out where it's actually going, but that's definitely something that needs to wait for manual intervention anyway.

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> "we have an aircraft en route to enter UK airspace and we don't know when or where - stop planning more flights until we know where that plane is".

Flight plans don't tell where the plane is. Where is this assumption coming from?

Presumably you need to know where upcoming flights are going to be in the future (based on the plan), before they hit radar etc.

For the most part (although there are important exceptions), IFR flights are always in radar contact with a controller. The flight plan is tool allows ATC and the plane to agree a route so that they don't have to be constantly communicating. ATC 'clears' a plane to continue on the route to a given limit, and expects the plane to continue on the plan until that limit unless they give any future instructions.

In this regard UK ATC can choose to do anything they like with a plane when it comes under their control - if they don't consider the flight plan to be valid or safe they can just instruct the plane to hold/divert/land etc.

I'm not sure the NATS system that failed has the ability to reject a given flight plan back upstream.

Mostly yes; however, there are large parts of the Atlantic and Pacific where that isn't true (radar contact). I know the Atlantic routes are frequently full of plans that left the US and Canada heading to the UK.

I have no idea what percent of the volume into the UK comes from outside radar control; if they asked a flight to divert, that may open multiple other cans of worms.

> If they asked a flight to divert, that may open multiple other cans of worms.

Any ATC system has to be resilient enough to handle a diversion on account of things like bad weather, mechanical failure or a medical emergency. In fact, I would think the diversion of one aircraft would be less of a problem than those caused by bad weather, and certainly less than the problem caused by this failure. Furthermore, I would guess that the mitigation would be just to manually direct the flight according to the accepted flight plan, as it was a completely valid one.

One of the many problems here is that they could not identify the problem-triggering flight plan for hours, and only with the assistance of the vendor's engineers. Another is that the system had immediately foreclosed on that option anyway, by shutting down.

Flight plans do inform ATC where and when a plane is expected to enter their FIR though, no?

Only theoretically. In practice the only thing that usually matches is from which other ATC unit the plane is coming. But it could be on a different route and will almost always be at a different time due to operational variation.

That doesn't matter, because the previous unit actively hands the plane over. You don't need the flight plan for that.

What does matter is knowing what the plane is planning to do inside your airspace. That's why they're so interested in the UK part of the flight plan. Because if you don't give any other instructions, the plane will follow the filed routing. Making turns on its own, because the departing ATC unit cleared it for that route.

> the previous unit actively hands the plane over. You don't need the flight plan for that.

I thought practically, what's handed over is the CPL (current flight plan), which is essentially the flight plan as filed (FPL) plus any agreed-upon modifications to it?

> Because if you don't give any other instructions, the plane will follow the filed routing. Making turns on its own, because the departing ATC unit cleared it for that route.

Without voice or datalink clearance (i.e. the plane calling the new ATC), would the flight even be allowed to enter a new FIR?

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