LONDON — A UK military aircraft submitting “spurious” flight data triggered the air traffic control failure that shut down British airspace for several hours and led to thousands of flight cancellations, the Financial Times reported Friday.Four people briefed on Tuesday’s incident told the newspaper that a flight plan submitted by the military aircraft set off a series of events that caused the wider air traffic control system to fail.The system reportedly took several hours and multiple attempts to restart, causing widespread disruption across UK airports on Tuesday and Wednesday.The UK’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) initially described the incident as a technical failure.NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe apologized to passengers affected by the outage, which drew criticism from airlines over the scale of the disruption.The UK Civil Aviation Authority is expected to conduct an independent investigation into the incident and report its findings within six months.NATS is also due to issue a report next week that is expected to provide further details on the cause of the failure.“It would be wrong to fire anyone from a job when you don’t know what has happened,” one person familiar with the process told the Financial Times.
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