Airways NZ boss reveals more about cause of August air traffic control outage, responds to anger over fee increases

Airways New Zealand chief executive James Young has disclosed more details about the mid-August air traffic debacle. Photo/Supplied

The country’s air traffic control agency says a routine attempt to shrink its vast airspace into two workable sectors sparked the mid-August air traffic debacle.

Five flights were held in the air, three of them diverted back to New Zealand in the August 16 incident.

Airways New Zealand chief executive James Young today disclosed more details at the Aviation Industry Association (AIANZ) conference.

New Zealand’s oceanic airspace, known as the Auckland Oceanic flight information region, covers an area almost four times the size of Australia.

The region stretches from the Antarctic to 5 degrees South, and across the southwest Pacific.

But much of that region has virtually no air traffic, or just a few long-haul flights flying at a constant altitude across most of the ocean.

“The software fault was borne out of a process where we shrink the airspace,” Young told the conference.

“So we effectively go from one overall sector to two sectors.”

One sector is created for the relatively busy part of the zone covering the eastern Tasman Sea and nearby skies.

And the other sector is for the huge but rarely-traversed rest of the roughly 30 million sq km region.

But the malfunction on August 16 caused a roughly one-hour outage, and operations were switched to a backup system.

Airways said its investigation and simulations of the environment at the time of the incident have confirmed a software failure.

“The sectorisation process triggered the event. This issue has not been seen with the system before, over many years of operational use,” Airways said later on Tuesday.

The disruption irked airlines and led to the AIANZ suggesting compensation be considered.

Massey University School of Aviation chief executive Ashok Poduval at the time called it an “extremely rare” event.

“We are investigating the issue in full,” Young said today.

Airways, a state-owned enterprise, has also fielded criticism from airlines about the charges it imposes.

At the conference today, some queried if it was right for Airways to pay a $20 million dividend to the Government when operators were struggling.

Young said the latest dividend was $10m and the year before that it was $20m.

“A large part of that was paying down equity that the Government had contributed in the Covid period,” he said.

Associate Minister of Transport James Meager was also asked about the dividend.

“On the whole, Airways does a very good job,” Meager said.

He said Airways looked after air traffic control but was also working on innovation.

Meager said the Airways dividend was not that unusual in the context of SOEs.

And he said he was reluctant as a politician to interfere much with the air traffic controller.

The new Aviation Action Plan released today said the pricing framework for Airways would be reviewed.

John Weekes is a business journalist covering aviation. He has previously covered consumer affairs, crime, politics and courts.