Anyone flying in or out of Italy on Friday morning needed patience. A fault in the computer links connecting Italy’s control centres forced controllers to halve the number of aircraft they could handle, and airlines responded by scrapping or holding back dozens of flights.
Trouble began overnight. ENAV, the state-controlled company that manages Italian airspace, said it noticed irregularities in its national communications backbone in the small hours. Backup systems kept traffic flowing normally until 6 a.m. As the morning rush built up and the problem persisted, the agency switched to flow-control measures and cut airspace capacity by 50 percent to keep operations safe.
The effects spread quickly. In Rome, a dozen departures from Fiumicino were cancelled by mid-morning, among them services to Munich, Lyon, Valencia, Tirana and Riyadh as well as domestic routes to Milan Linate, Catania, Venice and Trieste. Roughly twenty more took off up to two hours behind schedule. Similar scenes played out at airports from Lombardy to Sardinia and Sicily, and travellers on routes to and from Germany were caught up too.
Engineers quickly located the source in the network itself, and ENAV stressed that hackers or saboteurs played no part. In the meantime, backup links carried the data so that the largest possible share of flights, intercontinental ones included, could still go.
By the afternoon the company announced that the fault had been fixed and full capacity restored. Knock-on delays were still expected for some time, and passengers were advised to check the status of their flight with their airline before heading to the airport.
