A large air-traffic-control failure within the United Kingdom this week provided chilly consolation to South Africans who’ve watched their very own air navigation companies stumble.
The same breakdown within the UK three years in the past price as much as £100-million and produced 34 suggestions. This week’s sequel was a concise evaluation of their effectiveness.
The newest fault hit the flight-processing system run by National Air Traffic Services (NATS), the corporate that manages most plane shifting by British airspace. The system was unavailable for about three hours, serving to to wipe greater than 1,750 flights from airline schedules.
NATS restored the system inside a number of hours, however plane have been scattered throughout the mistaken airports and crews ran out of permitted working hours.
For South Africans, this was a first-world failure with a well-known end result. Our personal Air Traffic and Navigation Services has spent the previous two years recovering from unreliable navigation methods and a scarcity of controllers.
ATNS had additionally failed to take care of procedures utilized by pilots when approaching airports in poor visibility. At Richards Bay, Upington and Bloemfontein’s Bram Fischer International airports, it was air-traffic administration by prayer for clear skies.
A committee appointed by transport minister Barbara Creecy discovered gaps in security governance and weaknesses in communications methods in March 2025. ATNS later authorized R1-billion for modernisation, however by October controller staffing remained at 70% of necessities at OR Tambo and 82% at Cape Town International.
It ought to have been no shock, then, that South Africa managed a detailed imitation of Britain’s disaster on 1 August 2025, when the Flight Plan Management system at OR Tambo International Airport failed and delayed departures. ATNS restored it later that day.
The British model got here with a costlier pedigree. In August 2023, a flight plan from Los Angeles to Paris contained two waypoints with the identical identification code, one in Mexico and the opposite in Japan. The pc handled the anomaly by shutting down. Its backup acquired the identical info and joined it.
Investigators referred to as this a “critical exception error”, which is technical language for an exception that proved exceptionally essential. More than 700,000 passengers have been affected, with an estimated price of as much as £100-million.
To make issues sillier, the specialist wanted to restart the system was working remotely and needed to journey to the management centre for a guide restart. Before Britain may get its plane shifting once more, it first needed to get an engineer by the site visitors.
Nor is the problem confined to at least one or two international locations.
The nation that pioneered scheduled aviation, the United States, found this in January 2023, when the Federal Aviation Administration stopped each home departure for almost two hours.
A system that distributed Notices to Air Missions, which warn pilots about runway closures, hazards and different info required earlier than a flight, had failed. It turned out that contract staff had by chance deleted recordsdata whereas fixing a synchronisation downside between the principle database and its backup. The corrupted info affected each. By the time departures resumed, about 1,300 flights had been cancelled and 11,000 delayed.
Then got here CrowdStrike in July 2024. A defective replace from the cybersecurity firm crashed Windows computer systems world wide, taking airline check-in and dispatch methods down with them. Airports misplaced entry to some baggage and passenger-processing companies.
Delta struggled for a number of days after its primary US rivals had recovered as a result of the outage additionally hit software program used to match crews with plane. Computers had helped airways construct huge networks of tightly related flights, however the identical connections unfold the disruption with uncanny effectivity for a system that hardly will get meal orders proper.
Alaska Airlines provided one other demonstration in July 2025 when {hardware} failed at a knowledge centre. It halted the airline’s total operation for about three hours and prompted greater than 150 cancellations. Alaska later mentioned the failed element had a number of layers of redundancy – a superb function till all of the layers fail collectively.
The underlying downside is that airways can’t merely resume a timetable when a pc system returns to service. Aircraft should be introduced again into place, airport slots should be renegotiated and substitute crews discovered.
For South Africa, the UK and the USA, aviation’s dependence on ageing methods and scarce technical abilities reveals itself in very public failures, however these in flip additionally expose an underlying rot.
* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za and GadgetWings, and writer of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.