Timbo

Yeah, sure, no pilots needed at all! What could possibly go wrong?


UK flights CRIPPLED by system outage that shut ALL London airspace

Live under Luton, Heathrow, Stansted flight path? Sleep tight!


All London airspace was closed to incoming and departing traffic for just under an hour on Friday afternoon due to a computer outage at the National Air Traffic Services – Blighty's air traffic control authority.

According to the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, a machine failure resulted in all airspace over the capital being closed. All flights from Heathrow were put on hold.


“There is an outage at the NATS control centre in Swanwick, which is affecting UK airspace. Flights are currently experiencing delays and we will update passengers as soon as we have more information," said a spokesman from Heathrow as the effects of the outage spread.

Nats confirmed the outage was due to a "technical problem" at its Swanwick air traffic control centre. A Nats spokesman said: "We apologise for any delays and our incident response team has been mobilised Every possible action is being taken to assist in resolving the situation and to confirm the details."

It was initially feared there was a power supply fault at the heart of the chaos, but Martin Rolfe, the managing director of Nats, later ruled this out. Instead, it appears to be a computer breakdown.

An eyewitness told The Register that no flights are leaving London Gatwick airport. A Gatwick airport spokesman confirmed no flights were departing from the airport at the height of the problems.

Luton airport would not comment when we contacted them.

A spokesman from Stansted Airport said flights are still landing at the airport but all departing flights are being held.

London airspace has since partially reopened but traffic volumes are restricted following the server failure.

A Nats spokeswoman said, about 45 minutes after news of the outage broke, that airspace was now re-opened but capacity is restricted, adding that this could affect areas outside of London.

Ryanair said: "We has been advised by Nats that UK airspace south of Manchester has been closed until 7pm."

A spokesman from EasyJet said the outage is affecting all of their in-bound and out-bound flights across the UK.

A Nats spokesman said restrictions have now been lifted and that flights are now returning to normal, although he said there will be "residual delays".

National Air Traffic Services (NATS) at Swanwick in Hampshire is a major customer of Microsoft with Windows on PCs and servers. It also has a load of RISC boxes and IBM gear, we're told. There's no indication what component of the network was at fault at time of publication.

Air traffic services are run by a relatively small IT team with knowhow and support from Lockheed Martin. Common-or-garden tech is outsourced to Serco, Capgemini, Amore Group Attenda, BT and Vodafone

Bigapplepilot

IMHO By the time passenger laden airliners are flying around without pilots, computers will have made huge advances and be replacing humans in almost every field...not just flying. If you don't think so just youtube 'humans need not apply' or Google Ray Kurzweil and 'The Technological Singularity'. I'm not sure that anyone being born today will spend 10 years mastering anything...the centralization of Big Data, automation, and lightning fast access to that is not great news to humans. So in a sense....does any of this matter?

JamesNoBrakes

Well, also so they can take pictures while flying.

Bucking Bar

Voice Control in a 737 ...

Reminds me of the story of a conversation (read it aloud) involving a 727 Crew:

First Officer: It's Windy!
Second Officer: No, it's Thursday
Captain: Thirsty? Me too, I'm buying!

... and if it was voice controlled, it would have to have a larger memory module if operated by former Air Force pilots. Just sayin'. As an FO, I am pretty much placarded with a four instruction limit. Yeah ... I am pretty much data dumping the plan for the single engine missed approach procedure at the alternate ... I'm nodding attentively as I do an internal deep dive on the question of what Liz Hurley looked like in her 20's.

jcountry

There will always be pilots for the same reason there are people operating nuke power plants. You can design all sorts of "fail safe" this and that-but people are far better at watching machines than software.

People misunderstand "artificial intelligence." They think that for some reason computers are smarter than people. The reason you have to enter some funky looking numbers to buy at ticketmaster is because that little trick defeats even the best bots which run around trying to hack paywalls.

If super-smart computers suck worse than a 5 year old at stuff like figuring out whether the squiggle "5" is really a five, we are a very lon way from pilotless planes.

Ain't gonna see a passenger plane without pilots for at least several hundred years-probably will never take humans out of the loop entirely. AI is just not gonna permit it. We would need an entirely new type of computing which truly becomes intelligent somehow. What we now call AI are really just some computational stunts to make computers look "smart." They are not.

-Rutan had a great quote on the subject... To paraphrase "Sure, pilotless airliners are possible-you could build one right now. But the first time one screws up and crashes into the Rose Bowl, you will not see any more pilotless airliners."

sulkair

Whatever helps ya'll sleep at night. Predictable isn't it? A bunch of 'self important' pilots unable to imagine a world without them. Oh it's coming! And to your point about humans vs software... You're missing the point. Software will do the heavy work; human pseudo pilots can and will monitor multiple flights, they'll just do it remotely on the ground. Like Super Dispatchers with the skills to take over and work the automation exactly like we do now, or even take over manually. How many multi-million dollar predator drones do you think the DOD crashes?

sulkair

A middle of the road solution:

Just remove the First Officer. The airborne Captain will coordinate with a remote operator pilot on the ground who is looking after 4 other flights. Anything happens to CA. Remote FO takes over.

-Passengers get to keep their warm fuzzy.
-Saves companies tons of money.
-Mitigates the perceived risks associated with today's technology.

Do I like? Of course not! But I come from a railroad family, and I worked for 2 railroads myself. They've completely eliminated the engineer from nearly all switching operations in the yard. It is done remotely 'on the ground' by the switchman. They've also obliterated the 'over-the-road' traincrews of yesteryear with technology.

Directly comparable? No. A harbinger? Yes.

Bucking Bar

We saw how the trains run without the people. Wasn't pretty when you let the trains run the show.

gloopy

Not even close. You can't have anywhere near the same level of safety in an environment as huge and dymanic as this by monitoring and remote control. Just think about the levels of redundancy the planes themselves would have to have. Every runway at every airport CATIII/GPS auto land, regardless of failure levels. 2 autopilots and 1 autothrottle? LOL! Not even close. Robotic servos to get the gear down, plus redundancy, plus more robotic servos and computers to use the emergency extension, plus redundancy for that too, plus multipile battery backups for that as well. Every breaker every switch every button would also have to have multipile redundant robotic control with multipile battery backup.

Now apply that through the entire range of systems and operational dynamics and it gets absolutely laughable fast. Now picture a trillion flights converging into Chicago or NYC when an ATC outage/solar flare/mass security event/etc happens and there's weather everywhere. Military drone ops are absolute elementary childs play compared to that, not even counting the galactic difference in reliability and redundancy that would be required to prevent not just one but possibly hundreds of 100-500 seat Payne Stewart incidents happening.

FE's balancing fuel and getting generators online at the right time was an easy replacement with technology. Even then gens drop off line and fuel gets out of balance, but 2 pilots can easily handle that now. Yeah sure, maybe at some point in the distant future comps will take over many current human jobs, including flying planes. For now and for a long while, its absolutely unobtainable at anywhere near the same levels of safety and redundancy, especially at sub space program levels of cost.

We are dirt cheap compared to what it would take. And we will remain so for generations to come. The big threat will be reduced pilot long haul ops. That is something we will likely see attempted with the next gen of AC or possibly sooner. But no pilot ops flown by robots and monitored by people in trailers? Nope. Not even close.

gloopy

That still makes no sense. You save the cost of an FO, but you'd still have to have full robotic/remote flying ability with massive systems redundancy and backups for pilot incapacitation thats far, far in excess of what we have today. Of course it *could* be done, but at nowhere near the costs of an FO.