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A communications outage at Airservices that caused delays across major airports on Tuesday has been resolved.
The technical issues, which Australian Aviation understands were unrelated to a wide-scale global Cloudflare outage, forced air traffic controllers to process flight plans manually at Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide Airports, according to media reports.
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The issue reportedly affected Airservices’ air traffic service centre in Melbourne, which oversees the southern half of Australia’s flight information region (FIR), with the rest being handled by Brisbane.
“Airservices Australia has restored communications services overnight after a technical issue affected our ability to process automated flight plans on Tuesday,” a spokesperson said.
“All traffic management restrictions have been lifted and operations are back to normal.
“We apologise to passengers impacted while we worked through this issue, which caused some delays for flights out of east coast airports and departing Perth on Tuesday evening.”
Speaking at The Australian Financial Review Infrastructure Summit in Sydney this month, Airservices chief executive Rob Sharp said the air traffic management provider has been investing heavily in overhauling its ageing infrastructure as air traffic is forecast to grow around 25 to 30 per cent over the next decade.
This includes the major OneSKY-CMATS program, tower refurbishments, and the introduction of digital aerodrome services.
“That’s a massive amount of growth. There’s around $40 billion in airport construction underway or planned over the next 10 years. That’s about a 40 percent increase in capacity. Airlines are ordering aircraft in anticipation of demand and airports are expanding,” Sharp said.
“Airservices is the third leg of the stool. You’ve got the aircraft, you’ve got the airports, but without the infrastructure in the sky – that blue layer – you don’t get the economic benefits that support that growth.
“Like many peers internationally, our infrastructure is at the end of life just at the time we’ve got big growth happening. The challenge for us is: how do we deliver that infrastructure? Radar systems, control towers, the software that underpins management and tracking.
“We talk about the cost of flying, but we can actually do a lot more flying with the investments we’re making, so the incremental cost is not the same as the uplift in capacity.”
