Civil Aviation Dept DG: We never lost control

The Department of Civil Aviation today denied losing control of planes at the Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control Center sector after power failure rendered the center's radar inoperable for over an hour last week.

"We had a power failure due to problems with a circuit breaker and the radar was inoperative," admitted its director-general Azharuddin Abdul Rahman to Malaysiakini.

However, he denied earlier allegations by PKR this morning that the center also lost all radio communications, explaining that while local frequencies used by its air traffic supervisors were down, they still were communicating with planes using the standby "guard" radio channel.

"With the radar down, we used the procedural method (plotting airplane course and heading manually) and then issue instructions to the planes on what to do via the radio".

He also denied the department handed control of airplanes over to foreign ground control, though he said that as per safety guidelines, the military ground control sector at the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) Butterworth air base, with its overlapping radar coverage, was informed to be on standby.

Azharuddin said that during the over one hour incident at 2.50am on Sept 12, only three flights were directly affected.

"One inbound flight we successfully landed, safely and on time. While the other two outgoing flights we had to delay," the DCA head said.

[More to follow]