By Loushe Jordaan Gilbert
Airport Company South Africa (ACSA) announced that an investigation is underway to better existing systems to avoid power supply issues that affected Cape Town International Airport at the start of the week.
A power outage affected runway lighting, airside fire rescue, and air traffic navigation systems at the airport on Sunday night, resulting in some flights being rerouted to adjacent airports, and others delayed.
Speaking to VOC Breakfast on Tuesday Mark Maclean, ACSA regional general manager said all network systems are anticipated to resume normal operations today.
“We could never have anticipated an issue like this, as all our systems are of international scale, so our engineers are currently doing a thorough investigation into how we can better the equipment we have to ensure that issues like this are avoided going forward,” he said.
Maclean further said a total of fifteen flights were affected by the power outage. Four flights were diverted, and eleven others eventually departed in the early hours of Monday morning.
“We apologise to those who were affected by the power outage we experienced on Sunday. We experienced a fault on one of our main cables on our airfield and that fault caused damage to critical equipment, that resulted in us losing parts of our runway lighting and navigational systems. Flights were able to depart, but it was unsafe for flights to land, which resulted in flights being diverted or aircrafts staying at departure stations,” he said.
Operational network systems are anticipated to resume normal operations.
VOC News
Photo: VOCfm
