Delhi Airport Chaos: Unanswered Questions Linger as Airport Operations Normalize

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The Indira Gandhi International Airport, India's busiest, faced severe disruptions on Friday due to a major technical failure in its air traffic control system, affecting over 800 domestic and international flights and causing the cancellation of 20 flights. The Airports Authority of India (AAI) reported a glitch in the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS), which resulted in the manual preparation of flight plans, significantly slowing down operations. The issue was reported to have started on Thursday afternoon, but it wasn't until 9 pm on Friday that the system was restored. While airport operations have returned to normal, several critical questions remain unanswered. The AAI has cited a 'technical issue' but failed to provide clarity on the cause of the outage. 1. What triggered the technical failure of the AMSS system, and what were the underlying reasons for the issue? 2. Why did it take nearly 24 hours to resolve the issue, despite the first signs of a system failure appearing on Thursday afternoon? 3. Why wasn't the backup system operational, as required by aviation norms, to prevent such disruptions? 4. Which company's systems were involved, and who is accountable for the failure? These unanswered questions highlight the need for a thorough investigation into the incident to prevent similar disruptions in the future.