UK flights CRIPPLED by system outage that shut ALL London airspace

Quite.

Hmmmm... Worrying.

It would appear to be worse...

One UPS can fail, as can the distribution, but you would have though something as important would have redundancy. I guess we'll have to assume that failed as well.

Good job they're not supporting a nuclear power plant :-(

UPS's sometimes fail, vital bits of kit sometime end up "temporarily" being plugged into the regular power supply, etc, etc.

Just having a plan for when things go wrong isn't the same as it working.

Generator testing

I remember one site where they tested the backup generator religiously for a few minutes every week. When a major power outage did occur and they needed to run of the genny, it failed within the hour...all that testing had run the fuel down, and nobody had thought about topping it up.

And when

did you last test it?

Big UPS

Each of the backup generators is rated for 5MW. And what is the holdup life on your home PC UPS? Typically they hold up long enough for a controlled shutdown.

Let's be optimistic and specify a 4 hour hold up time. At 5MW that's 20 000kWH. For comparison, a typical 110AH leisure battery rated at 12V can supply C/10 for about 4 hours before suffering serious damage. That's 44AH * 12V = approx 500WH.

20 000kWH = 40 000 standard leisure batteries. That's nearly half a million times more than the 10AH unit in a typical PC UPS.

tl;dr: storing large amounts of electrical power is very expensive, that's why we still drive fossil fuel cars.

IN HARTFORD, HEREFORD AND HAMPSHIRE.....

...No one seems to have a 13 amp fuse.

Jim Willsher,

What's the battery life on your UPS, to keep your PC alive? Oh, plus the phones, radios, lights, power to the other hundred PCs, links to all the radar data you need for ATC, links to airports etc? That probably takes a tad more battery than just to give 1000W at 240V to a single desktop.

Presumably the UPS has to keep everything up long enough for the generator to fire up to keep providing power. That's assuming something hasn't gone wrong with the internal power wiring, in which case there's external power coming in, it just can't be distributed (and neither can the power from the genny).

Lets hope

It goes on for a while as I live under the Luton Flight path and it would be nice to have a peaceful nights sleep for a change

At least some stuff seems to be arriving/leadving Luton:

http://www.london-luton.co.uk/en/flights/

Interestingly NATS says:

NATS can confirm that a technical problem has been reported at Swanwick air traffic control centre.

UK airspace has not been closed, but airspace capacity has been restricted in order to manage the situation. We apologise for any delays and our incident response team has been mobilised.

Every possible action is being taken to assist in resolving the situation and to confirm the details.

Further information will be released as it becomes available.

I like this

absolutely fascinating to watch.....................Must be over now though as I can see things taking off

Its an ASK-13 dual seat training glider flying out of Booker, and now on the ground there. They usually aero-tow, so that was probably somebody taking a high tow for the last flight of the day. BTW, did you notice that you were seeing a FLARM trace rather than radar?

Thanks for the link. That has quite nicely wasted 20 minutes of a Friday afternoon that would have been spent wondering what to do....

Re: Shit happens

A time for colonial marines and nuking sites from orbit.