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or the airline industry, outdated and overburdened air traffic control (ATC) systems, which have been blamed for a string of navigation failures, may be far from sufficient for protecting the safety of millions of flight passengers.

Last Thursday’s incident involving an apparent radar malfunction at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, delaying all flight schedules, once again exposed problems with air traffic control management that have long been left unresolved.

For the airline industry, the problem is becoming much more serious.

National flag carrier Garuda Indonesia operations director Capt. Ari Sapari said the problem could no longer be overlooked, as system failures not only delayed schedules, but could lead to far more serious problems, including potential collisions.

“The system is prone to malfunction as it has to serve too many aircraft, making it complicated for ATC officials to arrange time intervals for aircraft travel,” Ari recently said.

“When the system fails, an airplane will be forced to continue flying around the airport for up to 45 minutes until the ATC gives it landing clearance. This, however, could trigger an air accident because not all commercial aircraft have special equipment to avoid collisions.”

He said pilots always needed guidance from the ATC tower before landing or taking off, no matter how advanced their aircraft’s navigation system might be. ATC is a service provided by ground-based controllers who direct aircraft on the ground and in the air to avoid collisions.

Despite the rapid growth in both outgoing and incoming passengers, Soekarno-Hatta still presently uses a 26-year-old system, called the Jakarta Automated Air Traffic Service (JAATS), to handle the movements of around 2,000 aircraft on a daily basis — four times higher than its original design capacity.

Although the JAATS was once upgraded in 1996, the system seems to have been overburdened with the increasing number of flights.

Ranked 16th the world’s busiest airport by passenger traffic, Soekarno-Hatta accommodated more than 40 million passengers in 2010, or almost twice its designed annual capacity of 22 million passengers.

Expansion of airline infrastructure, however, has not been able to keep up with the soaring number of passengers.

“Limited infrastructure, including deficient navigation systems, is one of the industry’s major barriers to improving its safety and on-time performance,” said Lion Air general affairs director Edward Sirait. “We have improved our performance by maintaining the condition of our aircraft. When it comes to certain cases, however, such as a sudden air traffic control failures, there is nothing we can do except sit and wait.”

The ATC problems are apparently not limited to aging infrastructure. The country’s airports are facing a shortage of 800 professional ATC officials, forcing current officials to work under severe psychological pressure as they handle far more aircraft than is thought to be safe, according to the Indonesia Air Traffic Control Association (IATCA), a professional organization for trained air navigation officers that has over 1,000 members.

“More often one operator has to handle a job that should ideally be handled by two,” said an IATCA member who asked not to be named.

Despite the handicaps, the authorities have played down the hazards because there are not yet any records of aircraft collisions.

The worst incident to have occurred in relation to problems with ATC apparently dates back to August last year when Soekarno-Hatta’s control tower went blank for 45 minutes, forcing arriving aircraft to remain airborne until the system was fixed.

“We can thus far avoid collisions because an emergency back-up system is also in use to support the main ATC system,” said Tri Sunoko, president director of state airport operator PT Angkasa Pura II, which manages Soekarno-Hatta.

Sunoko said that due to budget and technical constraints, a new ATC system could not be installed at Soekarno-Hatta before mid-2013.

Angkasa Pura is slated to cooperate with the Transportation Ministry to set up a new system called the Jakarta Air Traffic Management System, costing more than Rp 1 trillion (US$114 million), Sunoko said.

“The project was initially expected to commence early this year, but we have had to delay it. Based on our new schedule, we will start the project tender before the end of the year.”