Yes Geoff, So Many Questions
Airservices has a record of handling technological innovation. Consider a few::
July 7th 2000: Press report
Air traffic controllers at Sydney airport lost radar and radio contact with 20 aircraft for up to 15 minutes during a peak period Thursday evening, an airport spokesman said Friday.
A two-minute power blackout at 6:30 p.m. triggered a computer failure that took further 10 minutes to restore, said Richard Dudley, a spokesman for Air Services Australia, a government-owned corporation that manages the airport's air traffic control services.
During that time, planes carrying more than 1,000 passengers were forced to circle above the city with no contact between flight crews and the airport control tower.
Dudley said he did not believe there had been any near-collisions between the planes. But he called the incident extremely serious and said an investigation would be held.
''It is of great concern to us to establish why that power outage occurred, particularly as we have layers...(of) power supplies underneath.''
''For this sort of situation to occur is extraordinarily rare and that's why we want to get to the bottom of it as quickly as possible,'' he said.
BUT an electronics technician had previously told Airservices and Sydney airport that their back up power supply would not work as expected because the signal sent by the Control Center asking for back up power to start up was not the signal the back up power system was expecting.
His report was poo-pooed. He's only a techo, our engineers say it will work as intended. He was right, they were wrong.
I know a fellow who was flying in southern NSW that night. He recalls the sudden excitement on Center frequency. Call after call. We're on descent into SYD. There is nothing there, no lights, no comms, no answer on any frequency and it's just a big black hole. Repeated many times. MEL CEN of course had no idea and they had no comms with SYD either. SYD did not even have hand held battery back up VHF coms, nothing at all. Some aircraft diverted on their own initiative, no separation except look out the window at night, good luck. My mate is a chicken so he pulled a U-turn and landed in Albury and he laughed and he laughed and he laughed.
Back about the same time, the money making Airservices decided pilots had to pay for the phone call to contact the Briefing Office and arranged for phone cards to be sold so pilots could use them in remote locations. The safety case was taken over to the people at CASA and they were told in no uncertain terms this is none of your business, we are required to charge for our services so the safety case is just for your information. CASA apparently did not argue the safety effect of charging but rather asked what the back up was for this new 1-800 number. Not our problem says Airservices, we pay Telstra for a service so it up to them.
Shortly afterward the pavement was dug up close to the Canberra Casino in Allara Street near the access path to the Airservices Building. Cut the cable, no 1-800 briefing, no backup and it took days to fix, if I recall correctly.
I'm fascinated that Airservices are seriously intending their first remote, electronic tower is going into WSI, not a minor regional airport but a seriously busy one in the biggest city in our nation.
Just as intrigued that they are not making this installation even on airport with some limited form of look out the window vision even as a backup.
Amazed that this is a location where even a minor failure is going to have delay repercussions on traffic all over the country.
WOW, some big cajones here.
Like the hugely experienced Geoff Fairless wrote above, I'm retired too, "So many questions".
I just hope AsA really does their homework on the safety case, the FMEA, the redundancies etc on this one..... or as another expert ex-FSO on here says: WOT CUD POSIBLY GO RONG...???
The crow has been flying longer than any of us - no wonder he screams PHARQUE