Around 100 canceled or diverted flights, thousands of stranded passengers: nothing was going on in Swiss air traffic on Wednesday morning. The controlled airspace was completely closed for around five hours. The reason: a technical fault in the network of the Swiss air traffic control Skyguide. Urs Lauener, Head of Operations at Skyguide, explains how that could happen.
SRF: Skyguide is always the focus when something goes wrong. Now something went wrong – and really wrong.
Urs Lauener: Unfortunately, that’s the way it is, we have to admit that. That’s not the way we want to function. It is an event that is really very unusual, in that the back-up system did not react either.
You have to explain that in more detail. Every company knows that IT goes on strike. But why doesn’t a system-relevant company like Skyguide have a back-up system that always works?
Basically, we already have that. We still don’t know exactly why the triggering mechanism of the back-up system didn’t take place.
The systems are basically redundant.
We must now analyze this in detail. But the systems are designed to be fundamentally redundant.
What exactly is this device that has failed?
That’s relatively banal: It’s a switching node in the network where you could quickly determine that the problem was there. Then you replaced it and restarted the system – and then it worked again.
This time it was a device gone silly. But the question now arises: is air traffic control an Achilles’ heel of the Swiss system?
We invest a lot in IT security. After the daily operation, this is our top priority. Because we are aware that these systems can be endangered – we want to prevent that. We’re doing our best to ensure that doesn’t happen.
You have known Skyguide air traffic control for decades and have also worked as an expert for the federal government: Have you ever experienced something like this?
No, I’ve never experienced anything like this in this dimension.
Can you say today: Something like this won’t happen again?
We will do everything we can to ensure that this does not happen again. You can never rule that out. There is no 100% guarantee that systems will always work – this is the case in any business.
Arthur Honegger conducted the interview.