Cannibalised radar to be replaced

Press, 24 December 1985, Page 5

Cannibalised radar to be replaced

By MARTIN FREETH in Wellington Obsolete radar equipment at Christchurch Airport will be kept working with parts stripped from the Dunedin Airport radar under plans to speed up an overhaul of the total air traffic control system.

Dunedin will go without any radar until its turn comes to receive modem secondary radar some time in the next five years. —The' Minister of Civil Aviation, Mr Prebble, said yesterday that the old, primary radar at Dunedin was of little use anyway because of the low frequency of flights at that airport and the parts could be better used to maintain air traffic control at busier centres.

Mr Prebble said the age of the primary radar now used at Christchurch and other main centres was a “real problem.” “They are so old that the manufacturers no longer make any of the parts and the only place that we can find parts are places such as the Dunedin radar,” he said.

The Government now plans to install in stages secondary radar throughout New Zealand before 1991, which was its original target date. The Minister indicated the quicker timetable

would be announced early next year. Mr Prebble said freeing technicians from constant maintenance on the Dunedin radar would help speed up the programme. There would be nd reduction in the frequency of flights in and out of Dunedin and the airport would continue to be safe’ without radar, the Minister said. Airports at Invercargill and Queenstown handled more traffic safely without radar, and Dunedin had functioned for two years without radar after floods in 1980 put it out of action.

Mr Prebble announced three key decision taken by the Cabinet to speed up the overhaul. • Immediate withdrawal of the Dunedin radar and the installation, in time, of modern secondary radar on an elevated site in North Otago to serve the lower South Island, from Timaru to Invercargill. • The appointment of Swedavia, a Swedish air traffic system design consultant, to assist the Ministry of Transport in the design of the new system, particularly that of new airport control towers. Mr Prebble said Swedavia had just completed a redesign project for Sweden which had similar air traffic control problems.

• The rapid replacement of the voice switching communications control equipment at Auckland Airport. That' equipment, : enabling' controllers to talk to pilots, is a vital part of the control system at that airport, and the replacement cost is $3 million. The Minister said the Government had decided to speed up the overhaul because engineers had revised their assessment of the life of the existing voice system at Auckland. The 20-year-old equipment needed replacement immediately, and not in another five years 'as. the ; engineers had previously believed.

Mr Prebble said the new equipment, to be in use within 12 months, would also permit an expansion of other services at Auckland’s air traffic control centre which were badly needed after a recent increase in the number of aircraft movements through the airport The Minister said the Government’s decision . to, , speed up the programme!' was not prompted < by a recent near-miss incident involving a light aircraft and a jet plane near Auckland.

He said the full cost of the overhaul remained at about $lOO million.

Mr Prebble said he would announce in the New Year the order in which the new equipment would be installed. It would probably be installed first at Auckland and Wellington, the busiest airports. • Under the previous plan,* the lower South Island was to have been the last area to receive secondary radar coverage, in 1991. Mr Prebble said the Ministry of Transport had been instructed to ’‘give priority to installing the equipment earlier.”

' He described the present system as “obsolete, out of date and something that should have been replaced years ago.”

Of equipment at Auckland, Mr Prebble said: “If you give it a tap all sorts of dust and muck falls out of it, and I’ve been advised that technicians say that that part of the system is so brittle that they no longer pull it apart to see how it is getting on because they have the feeling they’ll never put it back together again.”, .' Questioned; about when improvements would be made at Christchurch and Wellington, Mr Prebble said the overhaul was following a rational plan to make changes first at airports working under the most “strain.”