The 2014 Los Angeles Center outage showed how one unusual U-2 flight plan could drive conflict-processing logic into a resource-exhaustion failure that rippled across regional air traffic.
A valid 2023 flight plan containing an exceptionally rare combination of waypoint identifiers caused NATS software to reject the plan, fail over, and sharply reduce UK air-traffic capacity on one of the year's busiest travel days.
FAA's Advanced Automation System tried to replace the core of U.S. air-traffic control in one sweeping program. Ambitious scope, unstable requirements, weak oversight, and underestimated software complexity forced a major 1994 restructuring.