Experts downplay Airways radar outage

  • Breaking
  • 23/06/2015

By 3 News online staff

Flights should be back to normal today after yesterday's air traffic control problem saw dozens of planes grounded.

The Civil Aviation Authority says no passengers were at risk when an unexplained glitch knocked out the radar system. Around 50 planes were forced to land without help, and most of the backlog was cleared last night.

Aviation Week reporter Adrian Schofield says despite the setback, navigation service provider Airways New Zealand remains a credible operator.

"The US has been having a debate about privatising its air traffic control systems the way we have, and New Zealand is cited as one of the first countries to go through that process," he told RadioLIVE this morning.

"Talking to people in the industry globally, [Airways is a] well-respected company."

Airways' chief operating officer Pauline Lamb says the company took no chances.

"We had a four-minute outage of surveillance, our main surveillance system and our radio communications system. We didn't know what caused that when it happened, which is why we grounded aircraft."

Mr Schofield says such disruptions don't happen often.

"It's hard to completely avoid outages. This one's not too serious – it's always terrible for those that are disrupted, but on the grand scale of things it doesn't seem like there's been a huge problem."

3 News

source: newshub archive