On Saturday morning, 19 July, Polish airspace experienced an unusual technological crisis. A failure in the air traffic management system of the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency (PAŻP/PANSA) paralysed the ability of aircraft to take off from most of the country’s airports. Landings were carried out in accordance with procedures, but the inability to take off for even an hour was a reminder of how heavily transport infrastructure depends on stable IT systems today.
A system that must always work
PAŻP is responsible for the safety and smoothness of flights in Polish airspace. It manages thousands of flight operations every day – both domestic connections and international flights. A key element here is the central air traffic management system, which ensures synchronised communication between control towers, radars and pilots.
On Saturday, this system stopped working, forcing PAŻP to switch to emergency mode. Although traffic was partially restored within hours, the disruption affected almost all major airports – from Warsaw and Krakow to Katowice and Rzeszow.
Critical technology, but is it resilient?
Although PAŻP assured that the safety of flights was not threatened and the back-up system worked according to procedure, the situation showed the limited resilience of aviation infrastructure to IT failures. In Katowice, flights were delayed by several tens of minutes, in Rzeszów up to two hours. In Gdańsk, traffic was in limited mode – take-offs every 10 minutes in specific directions. The exceptions were the airports of Lublin, Poznań and Szczecin, where no disruptions were recorded.
From the passenger’s point of view, the problem was short-lived, but from a systems perspective it is a serious warning. In countries where digitisation of public services is progressing rapidly, resilience to IT failures is becoming as important as physical infrastructure.
Security verification and questions about the source
The Ministry of the Interior and Administration has said that the relevant services – including the Internal Security Agency – are also analysing the outage for sabotage or external action. Although there is no confirmed information about a cyber attack at this stage, the sheer scale of the incident has triggered standard security procedures.
In practice, every major failure of air traffic control systems raises questions about the quality of IT infrastructure, the competence of emergency response teams and procedures for testing back-up systems. Poland is no exception – similar incidents have occurred in recent years in Germany and the UK, among others.
Officially, the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency admitted that the cause of the failure was a fault, but the agency did not give details.
“Following all necessary procedures, the basic air traffic management system was restored. The reason for the temporary problems was a malfunction, which was immediately removed.
We emphasise that during the operation of the back-up system, the safety of air operations in Polish space was maintained at the maximum level at all times.” – stated the communiqué.
Lessons for industry and administration
Saturday’s incident is a wake-up call not only for PAŻP, but for the entire public administration responsible for critical systems. It calls for careful analysis: whether PAŻP’s infrastructure is properly upgraded, how often emergency scenarios are tested and whether the backup system can actually take over full functionality without manual support.
