War of words erupts over Hong Kong air traffic control system

Lawmaker claims manufacturer of Hong Kong airport’s embattled new system advised of faults months ago

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Simon Li Tin-chui, Director-General of Civil Aviation. Photo: Dickson Lee

Published: 11:38pm, 13 Dec 2016

A lawmaker has claimed that the manufacturer of Hong Kong’s new air traffic control system was told about a fault with its system in July, but did not have time to fix the issue before it went into operation in November – a claim which the head of the Civil Aviation Department has flatly denied.

Pilot-turned-lawmaker Jeremy Tam Man-ho made the accusations at the Legislative Council’s panel on economic development yesterday, saying the CAD was told by system manufacturer, Raytheon, that it would not be able to fix the fault before its full roll-out.

According to Tam, the incident in question happened in July when the department was conducting a trial run of the HK$1.5 billion Auto Trac III system.

He claimed CAD staff were carrying out system maintenance in retrieving and archiving data when one of the flight data processors ran into problems and so the system switched to a second processor. It remains unclear whether flight data had disappeared from radar screens in this incident, Tam said. However, when the flight data processors ran into troubles in later incidents after the system became fully operational on November 14, flight data had disappeared from the screens for up to 75 seconds.

“CAD knew about the incident. It told Raytheon to follow up on it and give them an explanation,” Tam said. “Raytheon replied that if the CAD wanted the system to be launched as scheduled, they would not be able to find a solution.”

Tam did not reveal his source for the information.