Despite claiming ignorance of the near air disaster of last Sunday, the Nigeria Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) has launched an investigation into what led to the temporary breakdown of the radar at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos (MMIA). Many aircraft were delayed in the airspace for hours, fuelling the fear of collision.
An Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Lagos with about 180 passengers requested emergency landing and Qatar Airways flight QR592 with about 195 passengers also requested precautionary landing. THISDAY learnt that there was power outage from Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) that Sunday afternoon and the radar automatically switched over to batteries as standby power source.
But, according to a source, “the engineers did not remove the circuit breaker, so when public power source was restored it caused a spike as both sources of power supplied to the radar at the same time.” The radar was said to have shut itself down automatically, forcing air traffic controllers to switch over to the procedural (manual) method of controlling the aircraft as they could no more see the aircraft in the radar.
The cause of the failure of the radar was attributed to human error and NAMA is investigating “those who were responsible for that carelessness”, the source said. Transiting from the use of radar, which provides the visual of the aircraft in the airspace to procedural, which relies solely on audio communication took time and that period witnessed the convergence of many aircraft awaiting to land at the airport, while other aircraft were waiting on the runway to take off.
THISDAY learnt that before the shut-down, some of the aircraft were already positioned by the controllers under radar, aircraft were separated laterally by 1000 feet, but with procedural method they are separated by 2000 feet, so the controllers started the strenuous process of separating the aircraft by procedural method with the attendant delays. “The problem really is that aircraft is not like a car that stands still when it is not in motion. Once an aircraft is in the air it is in motion, so when you keep more than 15 aircraft in the airspace hovering at the same time it is dangerous; it threatens safety and that was what happened last Sunday,” a pilot told THISDAY yesterday.
There were accusations and counter accusations among those who want to bury the cause of the incident and those pushing that it should be investigated, so that similar incident would not occur in future if the erring officers are identified and punished. These fresh facts have rubbished an earlier press statement issued by the agency, saying that the incident did not happen, that the earlier report published by THISDAY was a figment of the writer’s imagination.
Former president of National Association of Air Traffic Engineers, Mr I. Nwankwo, told THISDAY in a telephone interview that the radar system tried to protect itself from high voltage spike and that was why it shut itself down, adding that it came up after about 30 minutes. “Public power supply voltage was full of spikes so the system shut itself,” Nwankwo said.
Also, the Director of Operations in NAMA, Mr. Bisi Adedara, told THISDAY yesterday that delays are not new in flight operations because they could be caused by bad weather, VIP movement or any other factor, noting that the radar at Katoka Airport, Accra, Ghana had broken down in the last two weeks but there had not been any panic by Ghanaian citizens. “There are always delays when there is bad weather, even under radar there could be delays. Accra radar has been down for two weeks now, so there could be delays,” Adedara said.