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The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) can confirm that Air Traffic Control (ATC) operations at Dublin Airport are now generally meeting demand. Delays will be experienced at peak times.  Factors outside the direct control of the Irish Aviation Authority, however, such as weather or congestion in European airspace, also contribute to flight delays. 

On 16 July, the air traffic management system (ATM) supplier, Thales ATM presented its technical assessment of the ATM system malfunction which occurred at Dublin on 9 July. Thales ATM confirmed the root cause of the hardware system malfunction as an intermittent malfunctioning network card which consequently overcame the built-in system redundancy. Thales ATM also confirmed that the cause of the malfunction was the same for previous malfunctions which had occurred since 2 June, 2008.  Thales ATM stated that in ten similar Air Traffic Control Centres worldwide with over 500,000 flight hours (50 years), this is the first time an incident of this type has been reported.

To minimise the possibility of such a recurrence, the IAA has installed additional system monitoring tools and proposed an enhancement to the failure recovery system. The IAA is continuously monitoring the system performance.  As with all safety critical systems however, the system will now have to be re-validated by the Safety Regulation Division, a process that could take a number of weeks.

Over the coming weeks, the IAA expects to slowly add capacity and smooth out the peak time issues.  For safety reasons, we will not operate the system to its limit until the system has been re-validated.

ENDS

For further information, please contact:

Lilian Cassin, IAA, tel: 087 647 4079

Frans Van Cauwelaert, WHPR, tel: 01 669 0030/087 9476743