On a Tuesday in September, British airspace fell silent for four hours after a military aircraft submitted corrupted flight plan data that cascaded through a system with no safety net to catch it. More than 2,000 flights were cancelled and hundreds of thousands of passengers were left stranded — not because disaster was unforeseeable, but because the cost of preparing for it had been deemed too high. It is an old and recurring human story: the infrastructure we depend on most is often the one we have chosen, quietly and incrementally, not to protect.
Military aircraft blamed for UK air traffic control outage affecting 2,000+ flights
Hundreds of thousands of passengers were affected; aircraft with passengers were stranded for over four hours waiting for information, and some flights were diverted internationally to Germany.