The display degrade in some workstations of the new Air Traffic Management System yesterday was handled in accordance with established procedures and air traffic control operation has been maintained in a safe, smooth and seamless manner throughout the incident.
The Civil Aviation Department issued the statement today in response to media enquiries.
To facilitate the China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai, some non-routine commands were inputted into the new system, inducing activation of the designed protective measures of the system among a small number of workstations not used for direct communication with flights.
As a result, the input was temporarily not processed in the usual manner.
Following established procedures, air control staff immediately switched the operation of live traffic back to the existing system, before switching to the fallback systems.
The procedures have been endorsed by the overseas independent consultant appointed by the Transport & Housing Bureau and in line with the safety management principles.
The department has reported the incident in detail to the bureau at a meeting this morning.
Secretary for Transport & Housing Prof Anthony Cheung has instructed the department to review the display degrade incident and learn from its experience.
The department also refuted allegations saying the controllers attempted to use the new system to process the non-routine command, and all the multiple layers of fallback systems also failed.
Except the small number of workstations, the whole new system and other workstations operated normally, it added.
The root cause of the issue was soon identified and the department will follow up and implement enhancement on data processing.
