One day later, Civil Aviation authorities still had offered no explanation for what happened.
The apparent failure of auxiliary power generators, compounded by bad weather, caused lengthy delays ﾖ in excess of two hours ﾖ in bringing the airportﾒs operations back online.
Joseph Reckley, general manager of the Airport Authority, acknowledged the power failure at the airport, but referred further questions to the Civil Aviation Department.
Mr. Reckley said there is a generator at the air traffic control tower, but insisted that he did not know why it may have failed. He said there were a number of backup systems at the tower, but that he could not speak for the air traffic controllers.
“We do know BECﾒs main power went off; we do know that there was a lot of fluctuation in the power supply coming in; we do know that [at] the airport terminals all of our generators operated, and we operated them pretty much throughout the day because of the fluctuation and surges in the power when BEC finally came back on,” Mr. Reckley said.
Air Traffic Controllersﾒ Union President Roscoe Perpall confirmed that there are auxiliary power generators at the tower that are supposed to kick in should there be a power failure. Mr. Perpall said that through an unidentified glitch, those generators failed to perform as expected.
According to Mr. Perpall, the outage caused radar and communications to and from the tower to fail, which left the situation at the airport “chaotic” for some time. The bad weather on Sunday “compounded the entire problem,” he said.
Bahamasair Managing Director Henry Woods said the national flag carrier had delays exceeding two hours because of the power outage. Among the measures the airline had to take was the diversion of two flights from Nassau to Freeport.
Mr. Woods said he had been told that lightning had hit the system, knocking out communications and radar, causing the airport to be closed and the diversion of those flights.
He also said that Civil Aviation would be able to provide more detailed information, and that he had been given no official word as yet on what caused Sundayﾒs problems.
“Our flight from Providentiales and our flight from Miami were here at Nassau for over an hour, and had to go into Freeport. [Civil Aviation] knows the airport was closed, and they know we couldnﾒt land and we couldnﾒt take off,” Mr. Woods said.
“So we had flights on the ground here [that] couldnﾒt leave, and we had flights that couldnﾒt come, and we had to send two planes ﾖ one from Miami and one from Providentiales ﾖ to Freeport and sit on the ground in Freeport until the airport was open.”
He explained that after circling New Providence for more than one hour, the flight inbound from Miami had to go to Freeport to take on more fuel, which put that flight back “two and a half hours or so.” The same situation faced the flight from Providentiales, Mr. Woods said.
Director of Civil Aviation Cyril Saunders had not responded to enquiries up to press time.
By: Quincy Parker, The Bahama Journal
