A power outage hit the Philippines’ air traffic management system on New Year's Day, with flow-on effects continuing for flights and passengers in the region.
The country’s Department of Transportation said that “normal operations” of the air traffic management system had resumed on Sunday afternoon local time.
“At around 9:49am [Sunday] local time, the Air Traffic Management Center (ATMC) which serves as the facility for controlling and overseeing all inbound and outbound flights and overflights within the Philippine airspace, went down due to power outage, resulting to loss of communication, radio, radar, and internet,” Transportation Secretary Jaime J. Bautista said in an online press conference.
“The primary cause identified was a problem with the power supply and the degraded uninterrupted power supply which had no link to the commercial power and had to be connected to the latter manually.
“The secondary problem was the power surge due to the power outage which affected the equipment.”
The transport chief said the ATMC “resumed partial operations with limited capacity at 4:00pm., and normal operations resumed as of 5:50pm., while equipment restoration is still ongoing.”
One of the affected airlines, Cebu Pacific, said in a separate advisory that flow-on effects would continue today. It has cancelled a number of domestic flights for January 2.
The impact of the outage was felt across Asia on Sunday, impacting flights to and from the Philippines, as well as flights that had to pass through the country’s airspace.
The Straits Times reported, for example, that direct flights from Tokyo to Singapore on Singaporean carriers had to turn around mid-flight because they could not pass through the impacted airspace.
Citing the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP), Cebu Pacific said “emergency protocols” were enacted after the outage was advised.
“CAAP said the safety of passengers is the priority of the agency and it is better to secure aircraft on the ground to avoid any airborne accident,” the airline stated.
The Philippines’ transport chief said the department, “together with the CAAP and the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA), are extending all possible assistance to affected passengers.”
