So maybe someone at NATS forgot to renew a TLS certificate? Or the person that has the passphrase written down is on leave – long weekend in the UK, isn’t it? ;)
But seriously, something has been “brewing” at least since Friday, a friend of ours had their flight via EGLL cancelled and rescheduled for – wait for it – next Friday. A week later.
Anyway, NATS themselves acknowledge they have some issue: NATS ATC updates
This morning’s technical issue is affecting our ability to automatically process flight plans. Until our engineers have resolved this, flight plans are being input manually which means we cannot process them at the same volume, hence we have applied traffic flow restrictions. Our technical experts are looking at all possible solutions to rectify this as quickly as possible.
That is BS, obviously. Processing flight plans??
Well I’m off to stock up on a few essentials ….
Probably a Russian hack.
Peter wrote:
That is BS, obviously. Processing flight plans??
That is pretty much what caused the shut down in Switzerland a few months back as well.
Processing the flight plans means they loose all data they have in the system about the flights they see or they can’t call them up and display them. The way I understood it, it’s not about you file a flight plan and there is nobody to “process” it, but it’s about the flight plan data in the system getting lost so it is not available to the ATCOs. Probably they also loose all information about slots and schedules.
In today’s world that is practically impossible to work around. Hence, they are shutting down the sectors affected.
NATS has released several statements, apparently the issue is resolved but it will take time until they are fully up again.
https://www.nats.aero/statement/air-traffic-control-system-update/
Working in IT myself for several decades, it’s a constant battle to get enough resources to do things properly.
When things are working properly we’re asked “why do we spend so much money on IT?”
When things are not working properly we’re asked “why do we spend so much money on IT?”
Certificate management does not get the attention it deserves in most organizations.
Certificate management does not get the attention it deserves in most organizations.
This is probably off topic because it may not have been anything like this, but it is fundamentally very hard to ensure something is done say 2 years from now, in the face of people leaving, PCs being chucked out, etc. So the latest IT fashion is short lived certs and a cron job to keep renewing them, and everybody knows how often cron jobs fail (not enough space, etc, etc). The whole (largely bogus) “IT security” gravy train is a victim of itself. Things break all the time and you need to keep throwing money at stuff just to keep it going. That is why our airports database was specced in a specific way, to minimise this stuff. And it (and EuroGA itself) uses Cloudflare to deal with the certificate, though that is not an option for ATC.
During my visits to Eurocontrol (Brussels) and NATS (Swanwick) it was obvious these are extremely top-heavy organisations where they probably have a cron job to water the potted plants.
Well I’m off to stock up on a few essentials
Baked beans and an AR15 
Peter wrote:
So the latest IT fashion is short lived certs and a cron job to keep renewing them, and everybody knows how often cron jobs fail (not enough space, etc, etc)
Today’s news is that the “computer” stopped processing flight plans.
That makes a bit more sense.
Sounds like somebody found a bug. This is not possible; the whole thing was written in Java.
Maybe one of these ?
A google on
swanwick computer bugs
digs out loads of fun reading.
When Swanwick went online, they were down to 200 known bugs. The whole thing has been a paradise for programmers.
