A weekend glitch in Japan's air traffic control system, which disrupted 1,600 flights and affected 270,000 passengers, dealt another blow to the credibility of the country's high-tech capabilities.
The failure, the largest computer outage in Japan's aviation history, also prompted local media to question the country's security preparedness at a time when it is gripped with a North Korean nuclear arms threat.
A flight data processing system, which covers the largest of Japan's four air control zones and automatically transmits data including flight numbers, went down for four hours Saturday, transport ministry officials said.
Due to a reprogramming hiccup, the main system and its backup went down immediately after being switched on, grounding all domestic flights for half an hour and forcing air controllers to operate the system manually.
The glitch is the latest in a run of troubles that have dogged information systems and other state-of-the-art equipment built by Japan's big technology firms.
"The credibility of their technologies are again put into question," the Nihon Keizai Shimbun commented yesterday.
Six domestic flights were cancelled yesterday at Tokyo's Haneda airport as airlines could not fully procure aircraft and other equipment for juggled schedules.
The glitch grounded 203 flights and delayed 1,443 others for more than 30 minutes.
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