Three officials suspended in HCMC airport power outage

On Sunday, November 23, Dinh Viet Thang, general director of the VFMC, issued a decision to suspend Tran Cong, deputy director in charge of technical issues at the Southern Flight Management Company; Le Van Tinh, head of the company’s Technical Center; and Nguyen Quoc Phu, Tinh’s deputy.

The three officials will be suspended for 15 days from November 23 to serve the ongoing investigation into the power outage that hit the Ho Chi Minh City Area Control Center (ACC) at Tan Son Nhat International Airport on November 23.

On November 21, the director of the Southern Flight Management Company suspended Le Tri Tinh, the head of the team in charge of power supply that was on duty on November 23, and a staffer of the team, Pham Van Dung.

Currently, an investigation team of the Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam (CAAV) is working to determine the cause behind the failure of the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems at the ACC.

Lai Xuan Thanh, head of the CAAV, told reporters in Hanoi last Friday that there were no problems with the power from the national grid or generators at the time of the blackout, but one of the three UPS units at the ACC failed.

The power cut lasted from 11:05 am to 12:19 pm last Thursday and disabled the radar system that controls air traffic at the airport.

As ACC technicians tried to restart the failed UPS, the other two broke down as well, Thanh said, adding that the UPS is capable of supplying power to the whole flight operating system at the ACC.

The incident, which Thanh said was the first of its kind in Vietnamese aviation history, affected 92 flights, of which 54 were within the city’s flight information region (FIR) at the time of the outage.