Air traffic in Norway was halted on both Thursday and Friday this week. On Thursday morning, the airspace over the whole of southern Norway was closed for three hours due to a technical error.
It led to delays, complete chaos at several airports and frustrated passengers who could not get rid of the stain.
The following day, the same thing happened in Northern Norway.
Large parts of the airspace in the north were closed for several hours on Friday afternoon due to a fiber break at Telenor, which is one of Avinor’s network suppliers.
Again there were delays and chaos – this time at several airports in the north.
Several flights were canceled in and out of Tromsø Airport on Friday afternoon. It affected air traffic in the rest of the region and the country as a whole.
Photo: Simen Wingstad / NRK
On both Thursday and Friday, Avinor complained about the consequences for the passengers. They have stated that the two incidents are not related to each other.
– Could have been much better
Air traffic in southern Norway is controlled from two control centers at Røyken and in Stavanger. In northern Norway, everything is managed from the control center in Bodø.
Per Morten Torvildsen, executive director of the online company GlobalConnectbelieves that the digital infrastructure in Norway is not good enough and that we are not sufficiently prepared for unforeseen events.
– The more we build our world on software and technology, the more vulnerable we become to such errors, says Torvildsen to NRK
He is particularly concerned about the fiber network in the north.
– The fiber network in northern Norway could and should be in a much better condition. There is no doubt that the network, especially in Finnmark, is very fragile for events such as we saw before the weekend.
Per Morten Torvildsen is executive director of GlobalConnect. He is responsible for infrastructure, networks and technology in the company.
Photo: Caisa Rasmussen / TT
– This also largely applies to the rest of the country. It is about the fact that few people live in a large area.
Not financially sound
He points out that from a socio-economic point of view it cannot be defended to expand and improve the fiber network in Northern Norway.
– The Swedish authorities have thought completely differently. They have put billions in subsidies in northern Sweden.
Torvildsen emphasizes that he does not know how Avinor sets up its control centers and airports with fiber networks in mind, but he thinks it sounds strange if the company had to close the airspace because of one fiber cable.
– The more alternative routes you have in and out of a building or an airport, the safer you are against this type of incident. It is a principle that should always be followed when critical functions such as hospitals and airports are built.
– Then the traffic can be handled even if a cable is dug over. There should usually be 50 kilometers between each cable, so that a data center can never go down even if it does, he adds.
More similar violations followed
NRK has been in contact with Avinor to get more clarity on what actually went wrong on Thursday and Friday.
Jan-Gunnar Pedersen, executive vice president for aviation security at Avinor, says that they received several similar fiber breaks when they worked to search for the fault in the first break that was discovered in northern Norway early Friday.
Jan-Gunnar Pedersen, executive vice president for flight safety at Avinor.
Photo: Avinor
In total, it took over five hours for their systems to return to normal operation.
– We then chose to preemptively reroute the data traffic to protect the control center in Bodø, which is responsible for the airspace from Røros in the south to the North Pole in the north.
– It also meant that the consequences at our largest airports, such as Tromsø, were less than they could have been, he adds.
On the proposal from the executive director of ConnectGlobal, Pedersen says that the structure of the fiber network that Avinor has for their services is sufficient, and approved for their use.
sorry again
Pedersen apologizes for the inconvenience the incidents caused for passengers and airlines.
– These are events that happen very rarely. In principle, that should not happen.
He repeats that there is no connection between the reasons why air traffic was paralyzed two days in a row.
Tromsø Airport is Northern Norway’s largest airport. It was also the airport that was hardest hit by the fiber outage in the north.
Photo: Ida Louise Rostad / NRK
– It is purely coincidental that this happens two days in a row. The first incident in southern Norway was a component failure on our own equipment. In the north, there was talk of one or more fiber breaks that had an impact on the data traffic between our devices.
He emphasizes that both the incidents in southern and northern Norway are being carefully investigated and that Avinor is already in the process of evaluating what went wrong on both Thursday and Friday.
