Airport systems crash leaves flights up in the air

Multa Fidrus, The Jakarta Post, Tangerang

A radar malfunction on Thursday delayed around 80 flights for over two hours at the country's main airport, Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Cengkareng, west of Jakarta, and left thousands of passengers stranded.

Airport operator PT Angkasa Pura spokesman Syahrial Syam said that due to bad weather and heavy rain, some airplanes were rerouted to Halim Perdanakusumah airbase in East Jakarta.

Angkasa Pura technical and operational manager Effendi claimed that the incident was the first such case at the airport.

In a similar 1998 case, however, over 100 flights were delayed because of an electrical disruption that affected the airport's radar encoder.

In Thursday's incident, a computer malfunction at 12:50 p.m. blanked out radar screens, leaving air traffic controllers unable to access key flight data.

Effendi said the officers were forced to resort to a manual air traffic control system.

"We apologize to all passengers who were stranded at the airport due to the breakdown," he said.

Some flights were able to take off at around 3 p.m., directed by the manual system. The radar came back online at around 5 p.m.

National carrier Garuda Indonesia spokesman Pujobroto said 16 domestic and two international flights were disrupted by the breakdown.

"We hope the airport operator would be able to fix the radar quickly, otherwise the delay would cause a domino effect in our flight schedule," he said.

Effendi said the radar breakdown affected all flights to and from the airport.

"We have informed all airports across the nation of the problem so they can delay take-offs until the system is back to normal. We also wanted to keep the number of circling airplanes down," he said.

Airport head Risman Nuryadin said the breakdown was caused because the airport was overloaded with flights.

"It's just like a computer. When it has too much data, the system will crash," he said.

Chaos did not erupt from the delay, as the passengers were well-informed about the problem.

"It's not a problem to wait. It's saver. If an airplane is forced to fly without proper handling, it could crash," said Sonny, who was heading to Hong Kong.