Transport Secretary Mark Harper apologises for major air traffic control failure. He confirms there will be an independent review into why a major air traffic control failure took place, leaving thousands of travellers stranded. Source: Good Morning Britain, ITV
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00:00 First of all, let me just add to what National Air Traffic Services said yesterday when they
00:05 apologised to all of the people that have been impacted. I know there will be thousands
00:09 of people that were hoping to fly yesterday whose journeys will have been disrupted. That's
00:13 happened to me before in the past and I know how frustrating it is, so I'd add my apology
00:18 to theirs. On your specific questions, first of all, an outage of this magnitude hasn't
00:25 happened for nearly a decade. The system actually normally is very reliable. There was a technical
00:31 issue yesterday morning which meant they had to revert to a manual backup system with their
00:38 priority obviously to be making sure that people could continue flying in and out of
00:42 Britain safely. That has less capacity than their normal system, which is why there were
00:47 a significant number of flights that were cancelled and people were disrupted. And on
00:53 your final point about an inquiry, a problem of this magnitude, there will have to be an
00:58 independent look at it by the Civil Aviation Authority and then a report will come to me
01:03 and we'll look at that to see whether there are lessons to be learned about reducing the
01:08 risk of it happening again and whether there are things we can do to put in place further