Swiss air navigation service provider Skyguide has restored 80 percent of normal traffic flows after a radar-display malfunction forced it to halve the capacity of Swiss airspace on 20 October. The technical fault – traced to a software module that assembles primary and secondary-surveillance data for controllers in Zurich and Geneva – briefly halted departures and arrivals at the country’s two hub airports before contingency procedures were activated. On the morning of 21 October, Skyguide said its engineers had isolated the defective code and re-booted the affected servers overnight. Although safety margins were never compromised, the agency is keeping a 20 percent capacity restriction in place until at least 22 October 09:00 CET to monitor system stability. Airlines have been asked to file updated flight plans and accept tactical reroutes; punctuality at Zurich was running about 35 minutes behind schedule at midday. For corporate travel managers the incident is a reminder that Switzerland’s heavily trafficked upper-airspace corridors remain vulnerable to single-point failures. Multinationals with time-critical staff movements through Zurich or Geneva are advised to keep flexible ticketing options and to check the Eurocontrol Network Operations Portal for slot updates. The glitch is the second major Skyguide outage this year and will add pressure on the Federal Office of Civil Aviation to accelerate plans for a back-up surveillance centre now in concept phase. In the meantime, Skyguide confirmed that no evidence points to a cyber-attack, easing concerns among companies about heightened aviation-security risks.
Source: SWI swissinfo.ch
