An “extremely rare” software fault was behind Saturday’s air traffic control disruption that delayed and left flights circling across the country, says Airways NZ chief executive James Young.
New Zealand’s sole air traffic service provider experienced an issue with a component of the air traffic control system that looks after traffic between New Zealand and Australia at around 4.30pm yesterday.
Young told 1News the issue stemmed from a technical failure during a routine operational shift in the Tasman airspace sector.
“During quiet times, we consolidate sectors, so air traffic controllers look after a larger part of the airspace. In busy times, we what we call deconsolidate, or create additional work positions, and through that process there was a technical issue with the system, which didn’t allow us to create the additional work position, and that led to our controllers activating a hold on airborne traffic.”
Five aircraft were held in the air, three of which returned to their origin airports after holding for around 40 minutes, while two continued on to their destination.
Four more flights were held on the ground in New Zealand and Australia.
The main system was restored at 5.05pm with normal operations resuming by 5.30pm.
Despite the operational impact, Young stressed that safety was never at risk.
“At no point were the travelling public impacted from a safety standpoint,” he said.
“We activated our measures immediately.”
A full technical review was now underway to determine the root cause of the outage.
“I don’t recall another one like this but from time to time it does happen. It’s possibly related to a software update which we are investigating.”
The Civil Aviation Authority confirmed it was monitoring the situation and would follow up with Airways NZ as part of its safety oversight responsibilities.
