It was reported on Monday that the Instrument Landing System serving Ben-Gurion International Airport’s runway 26 malfunctioned 10 days ago, on Wednesday, June 3rd, coming dangerously close to flights possibly crashing short of the runway Zohar Blumenkrantz reports in the daily Haaretz. A catastrophe was averted due to the awareness of an air traffic controller.
The system assists pilots’ landing during inclement weather conditions, and that was the case on that morning on runway 26. Apparently, the system was operating due to fog conditions, bringing in El Al flight 104 from Toronto and Israir flight 022 from NYC. An air traffic controller realized the ILS was bringing the planes in too low, possibly heading to a crash, compelling immediate action to avert a catastrophe. Numerous reports indicate the flights were diverted to Cyprus, where they landed without incident. It appears that the ILS system might have resulted in the flights hitting the ground short of the runway since their approach angle was off. YWN reported a number of flights were diverted to Cyprus on June 3rd during the morning hours due to fog conditions.
Airport officials released a statement confirming there was a “slight malfunction” in the system which has since been corrected, adding due to the low ceiling, the flights were diverted to Cyprus.
ILS expert responsible for the system at Ben-Gurion Uri Bar-Or stated that the security precautions and distance taken in air travel are great to prevent tragedies by providing a margin of error with adequate time to implement corrective action. He stated in this case, the cause of the malfunction was an inaccurate reading received by one of the ILS antenna due to the signal bouncing off a nearby brush that was permitted to grow too high.
An investigation is underway to determine why the brush was not mowed as required. Bar-Or added that the system has redundancy safety features and the planes were already alerted to something being out of sync, ordered by the unit to increase altitude. While the exact problem was not known, the pilots were aware of their altitude and speed as well as their exact location and the low-altitude notification avoided any incident, stating with absolute confidence that even if the alert air traffic controller failed to take action, the planes would have increased altitude and contacted the control tower for instructions.
(Yechiel Spira – YWN Israel)
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4 Responses
They are so stubborn!!
Why cant they fix the problems with their air system? Are they waiting for CHV a major catastrohpe before doing something?? No wonder why our FAA isnt happy with them.
mark levin—– Dont knock their system too much , unfortunately America’s air traffic control system is incredibly archaic, if you ever visited a Tower at an airport you will see all old computers from the 1950s still in place as well as other old systems in the national syatem.
i hope they fix the problem!!i, flying to israel iyh next week!!!
justsmile613,
We hear about problems there with near misses in what seems to be every few weeks. Here in the USA we dont hear about problems like that as often. Are our computer screens old? Can they route planes better by relying on satelite technology? Yes to both. But near misses due to equip every few weeks are not really heard here.
And, yes, I probably fly too much!!