Air safety concerns raised after Niusky power system failure

A major power outage yesterday temporarily disrupted air traffic services at NiuSky, causing a brief shutdown of operations.

Civil Aviation Minister Wake Goi said the incident was triggered by a malfunction in the Uninterrupted power supply [UPS], which is designed to keep essential systems running during main power failures.

Minister Goi said it was an unfortunate outage which left air traffic controllers without access to radar, radios, weather updates, and communication lines.

As a result, all domestic flights from major airports were halted, and three incoming flights had to be guided in manually using emergency radios.

Goi added that international flights flying over PNG were also notified, with nearby centers in Brisbane [Australia] and Oakland [USA] advising pilots to follow the Traffic Information Broadcast by Aircraft [TIBA] safety procedure.

Services were fully restored within 80 minutes, and no accidents or safety incidents occurred.
However, a key aviation alert in the Notice to Airmen [NOTAM] could not be issued until later in the day due to the system outage, which may attract regulatory scrutiny.

A preliminary investigation revealed that the UPS malfunction was compounded by a failure in the airfield lighting panel.

“While the incident was professionally handled by our team, it highlighted critical risks to operational systems that need urgent attention to ensure future safety and reliability,” Minister Goi said.

Goi has instructed the Managing Director to ensure full transparency, implement immediate corrective measures, and deliver a formal investigation report within two weeks.