Couldn't Sort Out Flights For Controllers

What costs about $139 million, is found in Ireland and doesn't work?

Answer: The new ATC system at Dublin Airport. Worse, it was handling live aircraft when it failed.

The Irish Times reports the system went live at about 4:00 pm Saturday. At around 11:00 Sunday morning, local time -- one of the busiest travel times of the year -- the system failed to match radar returns with aircraft identifications.

Dublin Airport officials say the new system, which went into limited operation on April 22nd, was immediately replaced by the old system, which is still in place.

Even though there were some 70,000 passengers in the air, the Times quotes Irish Aviation Authority spokeswoman Lilian Cassin as saying the changeover was "seamless" and "safety was not compromised."

The same system, manufactured by the French company Thales, is operational at Shannon Airport, a main stop and diversion-point for many transatlantic flights.

Cassin said approach controllers at Dublin normally see three lines of information adjacent to each return. "The first is the call sign identity, such as Aer Lingus EIN 123. The next line is the altitude, and the third is the speed. The display of information to the controllers should have identified the aircraft by their call signs but this did not happen."

Instead, the identifying information was replaced by numeric codes, she said.

Dublin ATC anticipated the possibility of such a failure, Cassin said. There was a skeleton crew ready to fire up the old ATC system -- which they did.

"Because of the nature of the work the safety aspect is always paramount. We have to plan for things to go wrong and this shows our safety systems worked," she told the Irish Times.

FMI: www.dublin-airport.com