Delhi airport back on track after ATC glitch; no flight cancellations on Saturday

The Ministry of Civil Aviation said the system was fully restored to automatic mode by Saturday afternoon following coordinated efforts of Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) engineers and ATC personnel.

New Delhi: The Ministry of Civil Aviation on Saturday said the technical problems faced by the Air Traffic Control (ATC) system at the Delhi airport have been fully resolved even as Minister Rammohan Naidu directed officials to conduct a root-cause analysis to prevent recurrence of such glitches in the future.

Technical issues in the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS), which supports air traffic control data, on Friday had thrown the operations at the Indira Gandhi International airport into chaos, delaying over 800 flights and cancelling 46 services.

The Ministry said the system was fully restored to automatic mode by Saturday afternoon following coordinated efforts of Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) engineers and ATC personnel.

Besides asking officials to conduct a root-cause analysis to prevent recurrence of such glitches in the future, Naidu instructed officials to plan for more system advancements, including additional or fallback servers to strengthen ATC operations.

It said Naidu on Friday late night visited the Delhi Air Navigation Services (ANS) centre to review the situation along with Civil Aviation Secretary Samir Kumar Sinha, Airports Authority of India (AAI) Chairman Vipin Kumar and other senior officials.

Teams from AAI, ANS and ECIL worked round the clock to identify and rectify the issue while the ATC staff efficiently managed flight operations manually to ensure passenger safety and minimize inconvenience, the Ministry said. Naidu also directed ECIL Chairman and Managing Director Anurag Kumar to additional technical manpower to expedite the restoration efforts. 

To minimize passenger inconvenience, it said Naidu also directed that more ATC staff be deployed at Delhi Airport to support manual operations and ensure smooth handling of air traffic during the system downtime.

"Owing to the coordinated efforts of ECIL engineers, ATC personnel, and the Ministry’s proactive monitoring, the system was fully restored to automatic mode by afternoon of November 8 (today). There were no flight cancellations on Saturday owing to the issue," it said.

On Saturday evening, the Ministry said Naidu visited the ATC Tower to review operations and appreciated the commitment of the teams that worked overnight to resolve the issue.