The contractor of Hong Kong airport’s new air traffic control system has pledged to provide a software fix in two weeks for testing after some information on eight flights went missing on radar screens last week in a worrying system glitch.
Raytheon, which developed the HK$1.56 billion air traffic control technology, made the promise on Saturday – a week after the incident – along with the submission of an investigation report to the Civil Aviation Department.
Referring to the recent system fault, the department said only “a few” flights were affected. The backup system was activated and clearance for departure flights was delayed for 15 minutes.
Raytheon’s latest report confirmed that the problem was caused by an accumulation of user preference settings, which exceeded the system limit. The flight data processors therefore could not function properly.
The current system can store up to 5,500 preferences, which allowed some 400 traffic controllers to individually customise settings such as text size and brightness of radar screens to their liking.
But on the morning of April 8, one extra setting beyond the limit sent the system into an alert mode and the first server was shut down. The staff member involved, who was unaware of the problem, saved the preference again, leading to a shutdown of a second server.