NATS, the UK’s major provider of air traffic services, has today published a preliminary report into the events which led to widespread disruption to travellers earlier this month. This initial report was requested by Heidi Alexander, Secretary of State for Transport. It describes what caused the problem and its resolution, with a full report to follow. Martin Rolfe, Chief Executive Officer , confirmed that this incident was unrelated to the major system outage in August 2023. He also dismissed speculation that it was caused by military intervention. “This was a software issue in a specific part of our flight data system, that we have traced to a small subsection of coding,” he said. “The issue has been identified and mitigation is in place while a permanent fix is safety tested and deployed.” The preliminary report reveals that the incident on Tuesday 8 September was caused by a software defect in a small part of the National Airspace System (NAS), which underpins the management of UK airspace.…