Airways New Zealand has issued an apology following an air traffic control outage that disrupted international flights entering New Zealand’s oceanic airspace on Saturday afternoon. A review is now underway to determine the cause of the disruption, as reported by Stuff.
According to flight tracking website Flight Radar 24, multiple international flights were forced to circle off the coast of New Zealand, with some even turning back, during the outage which lasted around an hour.
Airways NZ Chief Executive James Young confirmed that the incident occurred at 4:30 p.m. Stuff reports that, “This afternoon Airways experienced a disruption to its main oceanic air traffic control system which temporarily disrupted air traffic services operating across the Tasman,” Young said.
He added that operations were transferred to a backup system to manage the situation while services were being restored. “At 4.30 pm, the main oceanic air traffic control system experienced an outage and operations were switched to a backup system,” Young noted.
Authorities say the review will focus on identifying the technical failure and ensuring safeguards are in place to prevent a similar disruption in the future, reports stuff.
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