Dublin Airport delays to continue at peak times
More than a week ago the system collapsed completely, grounding 25,000 passengers and delaying many more.
The authority said while air traffic control was meeting general demand, but delays would still be experienced at peak times.
During the affected period, the radar system was not telling the air traffic controllers important information, such as the speed and height of the aircraft, which had the potential to have lethal consequences. The authority said, to minimise the possibility of a recurrence of the problem, it had installed additional system monitoring tools and proposed an enhancement to the failure recovery system. However, it said there were still issues to be addressed that meant the radar system could not be put back to full capacity.
“As with all safety critical systems, the system will now have to be re-validated by the Safety Regulation Division, a process that could take a number of weeks. Over the coming weeks, the IAA expects to slowly add capacity and smooth out the peak time issues. For safety reasons, we will not operate the system to its limit until it has been re-validated.”
The Irish Aviation Authority said air traffic management system supplier Thales ATM had presented it with a technical assessment of the system malfunction which occurred at Dublin on July 9.
“Thales ATM confirmed the root cause of the hardware system malfunction as an intermittent malfunctioning network card which consequently overcame the built-in system redundancy,” a spokesman said. “Thales ATM also confirmed that the cause of the malfunction was the same for previous malfunctions which had occurred since June 2, 2008.
“Thales ATM said that, in ten similar Air Traffic Control Centres worldwide with over 500,000 flight hours (50 years), this is the first time an incident of this type has been reported.”
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