The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) yesterday conducted a power maintenance activity at the Philippine Air Traffic Management Center (ATMC) that lasted for nearly two hours and affected about 3,500 passengers.
In a statement, CAAP said the scheduled maintenance started on January 22 at 4:20 a.m. and at 6:09 a.m., the ATMC returned to normal operation with the notice to airmen subsequently being canceled at 6:16 a.m.
The maintenance activity involved the replacement of the blowing/cooling fan for the second uninterruptible power supply that is being used to power the Communications, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS)/ATM system housed at the ATMC.
CAAP said there were nine affected flights that were held at NAIA’s taxiway Charlie for departure and 38 flights that waited for clearance delivery during the short outage that was necessary to complete the maintenance activity.
To prevent the recurrence of the ATMC technical glitch last January 1, Manuel Antonio Tamayo, CAAP director general, earlier said the agency recommended the procurement of a multi-mode fallback system (system upgrade), construction of an independent backup CNS/ATM and tapping a third-party contractor to provide oversight on the operation and maintenance of the system.
“To avoid this kind of circumstance recurring, we recommend the following plans for the CNS/ATM: restore and enhance to its original design before the incident, procurement of the multi-mode fallback system which is considered a systems upgrade,” Tamayo said.
Last January 1, the CNS/ATM system was shut down for six hours due to a technical glitch that resulted in the cancellation of 360 flights, with over 60,000 passengers affected.
An independent body is investigating details of the technical glitch that led to the total shutoff of the CNS/ATM system, said Roberto Lim, Department of Transportation (DOTr) undersecretary for aviation.
The investigating body is comprised of representatives from the DOTr, Department of Information and Communications Technology, Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center, National Bureau of Investigation and the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency.
