Integrity breaches are on track to be regulated if things like this keep happening.

Nearly 2,000 UK flights were cancelled affecting around a quarter-million passengers. Software error is being blamed.

Very annoyed British reporters are very annoyed with British air travel systems lacking more capable integrity controls that would prevent this availability failure.

Several sources told me that a French airline filed a dodgy flight plan that made no digital sense. Later on Tuesday, the Nats chief executive, Martin Rolfe, appeared to confirm reports that a rogue submission was responsible for the calamitous shutdown.

In a statement, the CEO indicated the organisation’s complex IT system defaulted to fail-safe mode when presented with anomalous data.

Mr Rolfe said: “Our systems, both primary and the back-ups, responded by suspending automatic processing to ensure that no incorrect safety-related information could be presented to an air traffic controller or impact the rest of the air traffic system.”

Surely the Nats system should automatically have identified an anomaly and spat out the plan, saying “try again”? Yet instead, the flight plan was ingested and set in train a shutdown of the entire system.

Surely.

I love that odd phrase “no digital sense”.

As in: this analog record of Paris cool jazz is so good, yo daddy oh, but you cats can’t have it online in London because it makes no digital sense. Yeah, man. Not even on CD. Do woo be boo bop. It will set in train a shutdown of your entire listening system. You dig?

Would the UK even exist if it didn’t have a history of accepting dodgy things from France?

But I digress… In actual fact, French passengers are constantly screened by the Brits to be safe and are allegedly rejected based on dodgy anomaly, why not French flight plans?

Easy, right?

And on that blue note, I wonder how the reporter would feel if flight plan capacity suddenly was halved by onerous screening requirements, or massive amounts of flights were shutdown by screening errors.