This has just happened and a friend of mine is stuck at Gatwick. Reports elsewhere suggest it is the above, rather than a radar failure at Gatwick which is what passengers are being told.
The Q is: how is this possible?
The fallback for a radar failure is supposed to be procedural separation. This has been said to reduce throughput by 5×. But this looks like something else.
CNN are reporting all London Airspace closed…..due to computer failure….oops….. having said that, Flightradar24 still shows aircraft making approaches into London, just none departing……
Airspace above FL215 is affected. Airspace below is/was saturated. Standard procedure in case of computer/radar failure is to clear the airspace asap
the Daily Mail Online gives a more in depth description of the failure:
The glitch happened on a newly-installed flight data computer at West Drayton, near Heathrow, which links directly to the air traffic control centre at Swanwick, in Hampshire.
It affected a computer which produces flight progress reports for air traffic controllers.
These are a record of instructions given by the controller on strips of printed paper, carrying information such as destinations, radio call signs and routes.
When the computer failed these slips had to be prepared by hand, which meant fewer
aircraft could be in the air at any one time.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-107091/Computer-failure-grounds-planes.
Now is the time to abolish enroute ATC — it’s superfluous anyway or even worse than that — see the Überlingen mid-air collision. Big sky + TCAS means nobody needs ATC.
When watching FlightRadar, I noted BCY88L, WX188, an Avro RJ85 from AMS to London City, has been circling above Kent at 4.500 feet for the past 20 minutes or so and has now departed back towards Amsterdam therefore the issue is not only with airspace but also having an impact at LCY – Heathrow, Luton, Stansted and Gatwick are all recovering aircraft and allowing limited starts. The question is – why is LCY closed?
The question is – why is LCY closed?
Because there is no parking space ?
Think of how much paper and man-hours could be saved if they stopped publishing the SIDs and STARs (some 50-100 for EGKK alone; I started counting and gave up) and stopped pretending that the whole system doesn’t hang on radar and OS/2 
Don’t talk bad about about OS/2 — it paid for my house It still keep haunting me every now and then, just this week got a new project in…
