Is one badly filed flight plan really to blame for the airport chaos?

A faulty flight plan filed by a French airline is unofficially being blamed for the meltdown in our national air traffic control system on Monday. While Nats (National Air Traffic Services) has declined to comment, it should come as no comfort if it turns out to have been a cock-up rather than – as many initially feared – a cyber attack. If one badly-filed flight plan can cause delays for days on end – as the airlines are warning us – it is an alarming reminder of how vulnerable our transport infrastructure has become. It wouldn’t take much input from a hostile state to bring the country to a halt.

You can see the vulnerability everywhere – it is the price we pay for running transport so close to the bone. It is there to be seen on the roads, where one accident almost instantly leads to miles of tailbacks. Our national practice of running utilities beneath the road rather than in channels alongside compounds the problem.