MANILA, Philippines — Senate panels are holding an investigation Thursday, January 12, into the technical failure that caused the country’s air traffic system to go offline on New Year’s Day, affecting at least 56,000 passengers.
Thursday’s hearing follows a briefing by transportation officials before the transportation committee of the House of Representatives, during which they denied ever calling the air traffic management system that conked out “outdated” despite having characterized it as such during a news briefing the night of the outage.
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Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines Director General Manuel Antonio also changed his explanation for the outage as he told House lawmakers that what caused it was a “fault” detected in the main circuit breaker which caused overvoltage, prompting the uninterruptible power supply to go into “standby mode.”
In contrast, Tamayo said during the press briefing that the main uninterruptible power supply of the CNS/ATM failed at around 9:49 a.m. after its cooling blower conked out. A backup UPS should have kicked in, but he said “for some reason” it also failed to function.
Along with Tamayo, Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista, his predecessor Arthur Tugade and Manila International Airport Authority General Manager Cesar Chiong are among the guests invited to the hearing who have confirmed their attendance.
Based on the guest list, the Senate investigation will also touch on national security, tourism and migrant workers.
Watch the Senate hearing into the airspace outage LIVE, at 1:30 p.m on Thursday, January 12, 2022.