FWIW
Yesterday I was planning on flying from the South Coast UK to Scotland. Filed IFR after breakfast for EOBT 1030Z. Had to cancel for a family issue, when I got back home around noon opened up my laptop and found 20+ emails from Eurocontrol adjusting my airspace joining time, moving it anywhere by 6hrs to 5 min fine adjustments.
If I had gone, would have probably cancelled IFR and dodged airspace up the country VFR.
I am not getting the flight plan problem. AFPEX rejects crap like nobodies business, and apparently a rogue flight plan crashed the system. When they tried to reset it, said rogue FPL was in the system and it crashed again. They did this three times before realising said rogue flight plan was in the system.
I suspect there’s more to this than meets the eye.
Peter wrote:
NATS have now officially said it was caused by a “single mis-filed flight plan”.
Apparently by a French airline… anyone hazard a guess how you can do that?
Suggestions that could make the NATS computer crash:
And I thought “Never trust user input” what part of Computer Science 101
I doubt NATS will ever reveal any useful detail but historically airlines have been doing all kinds of tricks to get around CTOTs and the coders at Eurocontrol have been busy trying to block each new trick.
Then there is extra software in each country’s flight plan distribution. NATS runs its own software for traffic management and the poor quality of that is legendary – google on it as I suggested above. The whole “Swanwick project” has been a bonanza for coders, AFAIK mostly Java, and mostly done badly.
The flight plan would have been Eurocontrol validated already so it was something less obvious that did this.
Could have been something perfectly valid which exposed a bug in the UK end. The “computer” crashed and they could not restart it because the offending data was still there so it crashed again. Gosh, everybody tells me this is impossible in Java 
AFPEX rejects crap like nobodies business
AFPEX does some data validation to make vandalism harder, otherwise somebody could just cancel a load of airline flight plans with it, etc. They also blocked the ability to run queries on certain types of traffic, IIRC. Not used it for ages. But yeah Afpex too is written in Java and stupidly makes use of the Java runtimes installed on your PC, which is madness, caused a lot of problems due to version dependencies, shows what a blinkered existence the NATS coders live, and most current PC Java apps come with their own copy of the runtimes (but are still buggy as hell; one tool I use daily – Eclipse IDE – barely manages to run for a couple of days).
Flew France to UK yesterday. Only a 30 min delay.IMO given the problems they had, whatever they were, NATS have done a pretty good job of getting things back to normal again, quite quickly.
Just read that Rome had a similar problem at the same time, creating concerns this was a widespread attack, but so far it doesn’t look like it.
NATS won’t be disclosing what it actually was because of DOS (denial of service) attack risks. There are lots of ways to inject flight plans into the system; any AFTN mailbox will do.
And whatever this actually was, there will be other ways to crash the system which may become apparent if you know the details of this one.
This one obviously passed the Brussels validation (the Paris centre was closed in 2020).
Peter wrote:
Sounds like somebody found a bug. This is not possible; the whole thing was written in Java.
Indeed – it’s impossible for Java to have a bug! :D
