But much of that region has virtually no air traffic, or just a few long-haul flights flying at a constant altitude across most of the ocean.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe software fault was borne out of a process where we shrink the airspace,\u201d Young told the conference.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we effectively go from one overall sector to two sectors.\u201d<\/p>\n
One sector is created for the relatively busy part of the zone covering the eastern Tasman Sea and nearby skies.<\/p>\n
And the other sector is for the huge but rarely-traversed rest of the roughly 30 million sq km region.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a routine part of code refresh which we do every eight weeks,\u201d Young said.<\/p>\n
But the malfunction on August 16 caused a roughly one-hour outage, and operations were switched to a backup system.<\/p>\n
The disruption irked airlines and led to the AIANZ suggesting compensation be considered<\/a>.<\/p>\n Massey University School of Aviation chief executive Ashok Poduval at the time called it an \u201cextremely rare\u201d event.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are investigating the issue in full,\u201d Young said today.<\/p>\n Airways, a state-owned enterprise, has also fielded criticism from airlines about the charges it imposes.<\/p>\n At the conference today, some queried if it was right for Airways to pay a $20 million dividend to the Government when operators were struggling.<\/p>\n Young said the latest dividend was $10m and the year before that it was $20m.<\/p>\n \u201cA large part of that was paying down equity that the Government had contributed in the Covid period,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Associate Minister of Transport James Meager was also asked about the dividend.<\/p>\n \u201cOn the whole, Airways does a very good job,\u201d Meager said.<\/p>\n He said Airways looked after air traffic control but was also working on innovation.<\/p>\n Meager said the Airways dividend was not that unusual in the context of SOEs.<\/p>\n And he said he was reluctant as a politician to interfere much with the air traffic controller.<\/p>\n