The Minister for State-Owned Enterprises says Airways NZ’s communications about the August 16 outage were “lacking” and the matter should be reviewed.
Air traffic control state-owned enterprise Airways NZ has said its chief executive, James Young, “misspoke” about an outage that caused five aircraft to be held in the air.
“Our expectation’s very clear: there needs to be a full audit of what happened and review of what happened during that incident, and also their communications post the incident, because quite clearly their communications were lacking and they need to be fully transparent about that,“ said the minister, Simeon Brown.
“So that’s the expectation we’ve set very clearly of Airways.”
Brown added: “I’m very confident that that’s what they will do.
“Clearly there was an incident that took place. Passengers were impacted, and that obviously has a reputation on the work that Airways does.”
He added: “My expectation as a shareholding minister is that they go through a full review process, learn from that, from their mistakes, but also their communication approach, post the incident and during the incidents was clearly lacking, and they need to fix that.”
Brown said New Zealanders could be “very confident” the country’s air traffic control system was up to scratch.
“These incidents do happen from time to time. Our expectation is that they address those issues and fix them, learn from them, and also focus on their communications, which were clearly lacking and inadequate during that incident.”
Brown was among the people attending today’s Auckland Airport airfield expansion event.
After the August 16 malfunction, James Young was asked if he had spoken to the maker of the software.
“We have significant development capability in-house. We are in discussions with the vendor,” Young told RNZ in August.
It then emerged that the software which caused the system failure was developed by Airways NZ itself, not an external entity.
Aviation Industry Association chief executive Simon Wallace yesterday said he was “disappointed” Airways did not clarify at an earlier stage that the system was actually maintained internally.
Young addressed the association’s conference at Tākina in Wellington last week, but Wallace said the situation wasn’t clarified during that event.
“Indeed, there was no mention of this at the AIANZ conference last week in Wellington and it is only through questions from the media this matter has been clarified.”
He called for independent oversight of Airways NZ to ensure such system failures did not happen again.
Airways said Young misspoke but did not mislead the public.
Airways last night said Young’s interview with RNZ took place shortly after the disruption, before full details of the historic vendor relationship for the relevant system were clear.
“In that context, he misspoke in suggesting there had been contact with the vendor, and we acknowledge this error,” they added.
“While he misspoke in one instance, this does not constitute misleading the public.”
Airways said the August 16 disruption event was unprecedented, and disruption to its systems was uncommon.
“Our priority is always the safety of the travelling public and that was maintained throughout the disruption. A full review continues to identify the root cause.”
John Weekes is a business journalist covering aviation. He has previously covered consumer affairs, crime, politics and courts.