Flights up despite computer fault

Nats handled a record 195,352 flights in June

New figures show that the number of flights in UK airspace handled last month is up, despite chaos caused by a traffic control computer failure.

National Air Traffic Services' Flight Data Processing System in West Drayton failed for around an hour on 3 June after overnight testing of an upgrade.

The glitch resulted in many flights and cancellations across the UK.

But according to Nats, it still handled a record number of 195,352 flights throughout the month.

The company claims that the number of flights it dealt with was 5.1% up on June 2003.

Records broken

Nats also said that three new records were broken on June 25 - for the total number of flights handled in one day (7,079), and the number of flights dealt with by centres at Swanwick (5,613) and West Drayton (3,990).

According to the company, delays worked out at 0.79 minutes a flight in June compared with 0.94 minutes in the same month last year.

Nats' Manchester and Prestwick centres also broke records with the former handling 52,895 flights and the latter dealing with 52,281 flights last month.

Prestwick also set a new daily flight record of 1,978.

The number of flights handled by Nats in the first six months of 2004 stood at 1,049,047.

This was 5.2% higher than the same period last year.

Computer failure

The average delay per flight attributable to Nats was 0.47 minutes during the first six months of 2004.

This was down from 0.69 minutes for the first six months of last year.

Nats is planning on spending over £1bn on upgrading its data processing system over the next eight years.