Radar outage in New Zealand causes flight delays

Radar outage in New Zealand causes flight delays. Airways is the fastest way to travel, there’s no denying it. But even the fastest means of travel, sometimes gets held up due to technicalities. Something like that happened on Tuesday when the air passengers had to face delays to trans-Tasman flights. The New Zealand airport authorities were forced to ground all flights and services across the country due to a radar failure. Records state that a fault occurred in the national radar system at 2:41 pm, according to the New Zealand time, due to which the Airways Corporation shut down all operations so that the staff could work on the issue. At the time of the failure there were about 50 aircrafts in the air, but none in danger. The authorities said that the exact reason of the failure was not yet known but admitted that it was a very concerning issue.

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The operations were resumed at 4pm NZT with limited workability and 30 minutes later with full services. The Air New Zealand said that the internal network failure was the problem which led to this shut down and delays.The passengers on a Virgin flight had to face a one hour delay while the flight between Christchurch and Melbourne was about 40 minutes late. A total of seven Jetstars flights, which operate the domestic flights for Quantas group, were affected due to the halt.

Many other flights were even cancelled but most flights were only held up for a limited time and were good to go later. The Auckland airport’s backlog of five international flights was quickly cleared, spokeswoman Simon Lambourne told Radio New Zealand. The other spokeswoman Lisa Williams told AAP, “Air traffic controllers should be commended for still safely landing planes based on getting their airspeed, altitude and location from pilots via radio. Air traffic controllers train for events like this, and today put them to the test but they did brilliantly.” She also pointed out that passenger safety is of utmost importance and that the pilots are ready for these extremely rare situations and they act accordingly to land their planes safely.