31-07-2025
British air traffic is run like a water company. That's why it failed
On Wednesday at around 2:30pm, systems went down at the Swanwick air traffic control centre responsible for all 'en route' upper-level control over England and Wales. Controllers were unable to see and direct aircraft above what we call 'flight level 245' – this is a nominal altitude of 24,500 feet with the altimeter set to 1,013 millibars regardless of what the atmospheric pressure may actually be. Flight levels are intended for keeping planes separated from each other, not for describing how high one actually is above the ground.
This failure meant that no planes could be accepted into southern UK airspace for around an hour, until a backup system was brought on line. Flights headed for UK airspace could not even take off in many cases. It was a very bad day for this to happen, at almost the very peak of summer airline activity with almost every jet in service working as hard as possible to get people to their holidays and bring them back. The ripple effect means that cancellations and problems will continue into the weekend.
Stranded passengers will, in most cases, blame their airlines – the companies they had a deal with. And if they think they can get better service from another airline, they may take their business elsewhere. The airline business is intensely competitive, which keeps the companies investing in their services and doing their best to win customers.
Unfortunately for the airlines, however, the provision of air traffic control – particularly en-route control – is a natural monopoly. Just as it makes very little sense to have multiple sets of water pipes running to a house so that water companies could compete for the householder's business, it would make very little sense to have multiple air-traffic control organisations competing for the job of handling the airlines' traffic. In a situation not unlike the railways, air traffic control at any given airport may be contracted to a different provider once a contract term is up, but 'en route' control above FL245 is a monopoly held by a public-private partnership called NATS Holdings (National Air Traffic Services).
Rather as is the case with water companies, NATS has no competition: its customers have to use it. Again as with water companies, the prices it can charge are set by the regulator, in this case the Civil Aviation Authority. But, again like a water company, it has private investors to answer to and they expect to receive as much revenue as possible. There is no incentive to invest in providing the best possible service as there is no competition.
This is demonstrably not a good or effective way to run vital pieces of national infrastructure. We all know about the hosepipe bans, water outages and sewage spills that have resulted at the water companies. NATS, too, does not provide a reliable service. Quite apart from this week's problems, there were major outages in 2014 and 2023 leading to widespread disruption and misery.
When I was flying fast jets for the RAF, we practised for emergencies and problems constantly. The culture was much the same once I moved to British Airways, which is still for my money one of the best airlines in the world. As an airline pilot I spent hundreds of hours in the simulator making sure that if disaster struck my response – or the response of my colleagues – would be instant.
The controllers and engineers at NATS should have the same ethos: they too have lives in their hands. The backup system that came into play after an hour this week should have been constantly up and running, and in play within seconds. The handover procedure – and procedures for dealing with other kinds of emergency – should be regularly practised. There should be multiple backups for every system.
And there is blame to go round beyond NATS on this. In a regulated monopoly market, the regulator who sets the prices and supervises the provider has to be regarded as every bit as responsible for any disaster as the provider itself. All eyes are now, rightly, on the CEO of NATS Holdings. But the Civil Aviation Authority should be subject to just as much scrutiny.
I'm not pretending the solution here is simple. Making sure that a natural monopoly runs itself in the best interest of the customers isn't simple in any industry. But we really must do better than this.
