Operational impact · Financial exposure
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INCIDENT LAB / 001 · AVIATION
When flight plans stop flowing.
NATS · United Kingdom · 28 August 2023
A documented technical disruption. Explore how a shared processing failure becomes an operational backlog. This is a browser-local training model, with illustrative traffic and compressed time—not live air traffic.
● Flight-plan data ● Automatic processing suspended
CHAPTER 01 / 05
The documented incident
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Model assumptions, evidence & full transcript
Historical evidence: NATS describes a duplicate-waypoint processing exception, fail-safe behavior in primary and backup systems, and maintained safety. The CAA estimates over 700,000 affected passengers and issued 34 recommendations. This exercise does not attribute the event to a cyberattack.
- NATS · Root cause and recovery, 6 September 2023
- CAA · Independent review findings, 14 November 2024
- CAA · Final report CAP2993
Training assumptions: Constant demand of 100 plans/hour; one hour at normal capacity, three hours of reduced fallback capacity, then four hours at 150 plans/hour. These are invented scenario values, not the NATS incident timeline or measured capacity. No cancellations or abandonment are modeled. Per interval: processed = min(backlog + arrivals, capacity × hours); remaining backlog = previous backlog + arrivals − processed. Values are rounded for display. The calculator below remains a separate model.
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