Heathrow in a holding pattern

By B.R.

FLYERS using London Heathrow had another miserable time this weekend. A computer problem at the air-traffic control centre at Swanwick, which oversees flights above much of England and Wales, meant that airspace over the capital was closed for 36 minutes on Friday. Around 90 flights were cancelled at the world’s third-busiest airport. This was enough to ensure thousands of passengers were left in limbo for many hours—either in scrums within terminals, or on stationary planes. Services were still delayed on Saturday. Several other large airports, including Gatwick, were also affected.

The centre at Swanwick, which opened many millions of pounds over budget in 2002, employs a notoriously creaky computer system. This was the second incident in a year to cause significant disruption. Martyn Thomas, a computer-software professor at Oxford University, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, said that computer platforms used at the centre were originally designed for American airspace in the late 1960s and could not be expected to cope with today’s volume of traffic.

An enquiry has been launched into what went wrong. National Air Traffic Services (NATS), the contractor which manages Britain’s airspace, said that a single line of erroneous code, which has since been identified, caused the problem. It went on to say that there was little chance of a repeat and that passengers had not been in danger. However, Vince Cable, Britain’s blunt business secretary, seems already to have made up his mind that the problem is more deep-rooted. NATS, which is 49% state-owned, has skimped on investment for many years, he said.

NATS is not London's only weak link. The capital also operates with a fragile and overcrowded main hub. There are close to 1,300 plane movements a day at Heathrow, all of which must be accommodated on just two runways. Flying into London's main airport can be such a frustrating experience that many business travellers dread being dispatched there. It is not just the time spent in holding patterns over the airport that irks them; as Friday proved, the system is so stretched that it doesn’t take much to bring everything to a standstill. Most depressingly, plans to increase runway capacity are moving at a glacial pace. Politicians, it seems, agree that building more runways would bring economic benefit. But they are mostly happy to leave the decision of how this should be done to a future government, rather than risk unpopularity now with voters under flight paths. Visitors to London should prepare for delays for many years to come.