Relax - KL air traffic blackout fright

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MALAYSIA - Two weeks ago, the air traffic control tower at Malaysia's Subang airport suffered a power failure for more than an hour.

The Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) acknowledged that there was a failure, but said that only three flights were directly affected during the outage, which began at 2.50am on Sept 12.

DCA director-general Azharuddin Abdul Rahman told liberal news portal Malaysiakini.com: "We successfully managed to land one inbound flight and on time. We had to delay the other two outbound flights."

He said the outbound flights from Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport had to be delayed because they had to put more distance between flights for safety reasons.

The outage prompted Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) vice-president Nurul Izzah Anwar to ask for an independent audit over the system failure.

Ms Nurul Izzah is the daughter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

The DCA on Saturday denied reports that they had lost control of the planes during the time when the control tower shut down.

Mr Azharuddin admitted that there was a power failure due to problems with a circuit breaker and that the radar was inoperative.

He said that the problem was not with the air traffic control system per se, but just a power outage.

The director-general explained that no one in the tower noticed that the circuit breaker had tripped and power supply was cut off.

The standby uninterruptable power supply (UPS) went into operation immediately, but the battery lost power and the radar went off again.

Mr Azharuddin denied the opposition party's allegations that the tower lost all radio communications.

He said that although the local frequencies used by its air traffic supervisors were down, they were still communicating with planes using the standby "guard" radio channel.

He said: "With the radar down, we used the procedural method (plotting airplane course and heading manually) and then issued instructions to the planes on what to do via the radio."

He also denied that the department handed control of planes to foreign ground control. But he said that as per safety guidelines, the military ground control sector at the Royal Malaysian Air Force Butterworth air base, with its overlapping radar coverage, was informed to be on standby.

Mr Azharuddin said that after they discovered the tripped circuit breaker, the device was immediately reset.

Power came back online soon after and the air traffic control system was up and running again.

Meanwhile, Ms Nurul Izzah said that the Transport Ministry and DCA should provide answers in an independent audit as a similar system is being used at the KLIA2, the new low-cost terminal in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, liberal news portal Malaysian Insider reported.

"If the system failure is not clarified in an independent audit, there will be suspicion that millions of ringgit being used for a similar system in KLIA2 will face the same fate," she told reporters outside Subang airport.

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KL air traffic blackout fright

The New Paper | Tue, Sep 25 2012

Outbound flights from Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport had to be delayed.

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malaysia

airport