Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It is Wednesday the 6th of

September the day that the report, the preliminary report into what went wrong on bank holiday weekend

the 28th of August to be specific with the UK's air traffic control system.

I have read the report so you didn't have to and well let me tell you what it says.

First of all of course the background is that we saw on one of the busiest days of the year of complete failure

for several hours of the Nats, that's the National Air Traffic Service, the Nats system.

And although controllers could still safely handle aircraft, they had to reduce their workload

to just 15% of normal times because everything kind of had to be done manually.

So it was very, very messy.

It led to thousands of cancelled flights, hundreds of thousands of people being stranded and many, many

long delays. And so therefore, everybody is keen to know what happened and what they're going to do

about it. And I've been going through to get the key events. So I suppose the story really

begins about four in the morning. That was the

time that a jet, which I think was Air France, flight 85 from San Francisco to Paris, took off. That's

4 a.m. British time. It was 8 p. 8pm on the California coast. And I say, I think,

because in the report they don't identify the flight that was at the heart of this issue,

but they do say it was a flight that took off at around 4 a.m. British time and got in at around 3pm

British time. And if you look at the schedule for the Air France Flight 85, San Francisco to Paris,

that matches it pretty closely to within 10 minutes. Anyway, the flight plan contained duplicate waypoints. Now, what are they?

They are the points where everywhere that pilots fly, they generally navigate using a series of waypoints.

And these are very simply points on the earth's surface if you

were coming in from the isle of white towards the london area you might traverse kathy absav and

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