Sydney Airport thrown into chaos - again

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Sydney Airport thrown into chaos - again

Source: AAP|Published: Tuesday August 1, 11:05 AM

Sydney Airport was thrown into chaos today when a power cut hit air traffic control operations.

Back-up power systems kicked in but air traffic services had to be scaled back, forcing the cancellation of international and domestic departures and some landings, said Airservices Australia.

Several international and domestic flights were hit.

Today's failure followed a serious incident early last month at Sydney airport when air traffic control operations were blacked out for up to 12 minutes.

Airservices Australia spokesman Richard Dudley said mains power was lost about 7.30am (AEST) today and was not restored until 8.50am.

Emergency standby generators kicked in and powered up the system and battery power was supplied to controllers' consoles.

But losing mains power sent Airservices into essential services mode, meaning the number of air traffic control consoles were cut to four to process arriving aircraft only.

Mr Dudley said even though the airport had full backup power, takeoffs stopped until Airservices worked out what caused the problem.

Sydney airport spokesman Peter Gibbs said seven international and 15 domestic flights were waiting for instructions from the air traffic control tower when the power failed this morning.

"Up until 10am we had an additional 19 international aircraft which we're responsible for that were due for takeoffs."

With operations restricted to landings only during the breakdown, four aircraft returned to Brisbane, two flights from Melbourne were diverted to Canberra, and several turboprop aircraft landed at Williamtown Airport at Newcastle.

Dozens of departures were held up on the ground and the backlog would take until this afternoon to clear, he said.

"When you have this sort of interruption to normal service provision, safety is our number one concern and so therefore we go into a degraded mode of operation for that very reason and we impose some traffic restrictions, not the least of which is preventing the departure of aircraft," Mr Dudley told the John Laws radio program.

"We're basically clearing that backlog but it would take us another couple of hours to get through that."

Asked if it would take until at least mid-afternoon to get back to normal, Mr Dudley said: 'That'll be about the time, yes.'

Mr Gibbs said the incident showed new emergency measures at Sydney airport for managing aircraft and passengers had worked very well.

"We were able to spring into action very quickly and ... minimise delays to both aircraft and passengers as much as possible," he said.

"All agencies within the airport are working very hard to get any glitches out of the system as quickly as possible.

"We are very confident of our role during the Olympics," he said.

Mr Dudley said Airservices appeared to lose mains power due to a fault at an electricity substation.

"The bottom line is that we go to an essential service provision in order to maximise the amount of power we have available, not knowing at that stage of course we may have mains power out," he said.

During evening peak hour on July 6, both mains and backup power failed for two minutes and it took another 10 minutes to reboot computers.

Mr Dudley said the two incidents were not linked, as today's problem was external to Airservices.

The July incident was still being investigated but he said it appeared a setting on the backup power was incorrect, preventing it kicking in.

http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/0008/01/A42968-2000Aug1.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 31, 2000


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