Civil Aviation Dept DG: We never lost control
Kit P: "(Department
of Civil Aviation director-general) Azharuddin Abdul Rahman explained
that when the circuit breaker tripped and power supply was cut off, no
one noticed. Though the standby uninterruptable power supply (UPS)
immediately came online to sustain it, the radar went offline after the
UPS battery supply was exhausted."This incident and the obvious lack of risk management planning amounts to criminal negligence. A high-impact system such as traffic control radar normally have remote sensors which inform the base if the power is down or the radar not operating for some other reason.
This was potentially a very, very dangerous situation. They are just plain lucky it occurred in the early hours of the morning.
With this kind of safety attitude, who can trust the government's word on the safety of the proposed nuclear power stations?
Telestai!: While I am not trying to be a smart alec, should the radar system of an international airport not have a back-up generator set in case of power failure?
Instead it relied on a UPS which will run out of power within 30 minutes. How many of us have been through blackouts lasting for more than 30 minutes? I'd say everyone who read my comment.
It is indeed frightening to know that our airports have been occasionally operating without a radar, perhaps waiting for a disaster to take place.
Ipohcrite: Obviously, someone was sleeping on the job. It is simply inconceivable that "no one noticed" when the outage occurred even though it was backed up by UPS.
This is a case of something badly gone wrong, and humans are probably involved, so to just dismiss it so casually is professionally dishonest and scares the daylights out of any right-thinking citizen.
Anonymous #90975058: This should not happen and this again proves the incompetence of our Civil Aviation Department. There should always be a back-up system.
Our standards must be really dropping, and who is to be blamed? Blame it on the opposition and spin a story - may be somebody would have seen DAP leader Lim Kit Siang pissing on the circuit breaker.
Bystander: Azharuddin, your system cannot depends solely on your staff to notice the power failure, it must have a trigger to ensure if it happens whether they like to notice or not and immediately the whole unit must respond with back up power to ensure safety.
BernieBaby: I was in a Bangkok-Singapore flight a few months ago when the new Bangkok International Airport radar broke down. Since they had already closed the door of the aircraft, we had to sit in the plane until they brought the radar back up.
It took 2.5 hours to restore the system, close to the flight time. No flights were allowed to take off but I noticed some coming in from my plane seat, perhaps on manual instructions from the control tower.
I question the maintenance and the back-up system that Bangkok has for its radar. There should be back-ups that can be triggered immediately or else you are not a world-class airport.
Odin: Mr DG, when you operate a critical service such as air traffic control, should you not have an emergency power supply in the form of an electric generator that kicks in within a fraction of a second of a power failure?
That there were ‘only' three flights, is not the point. The point is that should an accident have happened, you are talking about the lives of a few hundred humans, and not to mention huge fiscal loss to various parties affected.
At this rate, Malaysia won't be a developed country until the year 3030.
One more point, Mr DG - what would have happened had there been, say, half a dozen flights on hold in mid-air waiting for clearance to land? Would your manual plotting have been fast enough? I doubt it very much.
KSD: You are running a mission critical system on which many lives depend and it does not alert its users that power has tripped? Facepalm!
Circuit breaker? Are you sure it was not the cleaning lady who unplugged the system so that she could run her vacuum cleaner?
Air traffic control flop: PKR wants gov't to explain
TimsTime: BN is hit with scandal after scandal. It is important that Pakatan Rakyat make sure that they don't fall into the same trap of making headlines and let BN find excuses to find fault with them.
As for the air traffic control system that went blank, I hoped that the PM was on the plane with the transport minister at that time so they could feel of what it was like. In Singapore, the minister would have been asked to resign.
Mirror On The Wall: An accident waiting to happen is an adage waiting to be proven in this instance. Just like everything else, we seem to flying on a wing a prayer under this regime.
It reflects the slipshod manner of governance that is now a part of the culture in Malaysia.
A radical change and paradigm shift in thinking is needed and this can only come about via a change in government. Or do we wait for an accident to take place before we open our eyes?
Solaris: What's happening here? Now no one can fly...
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