Air traffic radio outage over ocean had no impact, risk for South African airlines

Earlier this week, several reports may have added some holiday worry to travelling South Africans when news outlets headlined an aviation communication failure in our airspace on 6 December, albeit in the globe’s deep south where air traffic is low.

The failure occurred over a huge stretch of ocean, south of the country all the way to Antarctica, that South African air traffic control is responsible for via international treaty. The problem was resolved early on 7 December.

It was the CPDLC (Controller Pilot Data Link Communication) that failed.

This system enables text messaging between pilots in the South African controlled airspace stretching to Antarctica and is simply an alternative to voice communication over radio.

All domestic airlines said in unison that they were not impacted by the outage. Instead, several noted that commercial airlines usually rely on satellites to relay information between the air and ground.

ATNS (Air Traffic Control and Navigation Services) said: “ATNS is working closely with its data link service provider to determine the root cause of this failure. It must be emphasised, however, that this incident is unprecedented as ATNS has never experienced an occurrence of this nature before.”  

The state agency also provided comfort to travellers.

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It said: “ATNS has a number of operational contingency plans that may be operationalised at any given time, depending on the levels of service disruptions or risks identified. Air traffic volumes are naturally low within the oceanic air space; therefore, no separation risks were identified during this incident.”

In short, the risk was not significant.

ATNS noted that as part of a now ongoing investigation into the challenge, it will also investigate redundancies in the system and identify possible improvements to prevent future occurrences.

Despite airlines reporting no impact, the DA’s spokesperson on transport Chris Hunsinger said that Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula should be taken to task over what he called a ‘collapse’ instead of the glitch that ATNS reported it to be.

He said: “This communication “blackout” raises serious concerns with regard to air traffic safety and is a serious breach of the international obligation which South Africa and ATNS must uphold for aviation safety in three different flight information zones”.

He also said the DA will be lodging a formal query about the incident and that he expects an explanation from Mbalula.

Hunsinger added: “The collapse of this system also revealed that the back-up system which is a conventional High Frequency Voice-communication system has been broken and not repaired for close to a year. Without both systems pilots and ground control had no way of communicating with each other”.

ANTS said: “Safety is our number one priority. We are part of a global collective that has been rated topmost when it comes to aviation safety. The recent ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) safety audit report is indicative of the South African aviation industry’s stance and commitment to safer skies”.