An apparent power surge at Belgium’s air traffic control facilitiesclosed some of the nation’s airspaceWednesday morning, forcing flights to divert to nearby countries, The Independent reported. A Belgocontrol spokesman told UK news agencies the cause of the power surge is yet unclear. “The surge also took out our emergency generators, which is why we had to clear the airspace,” he said. By midday, almost 150 flights at the main airport in Brussels were cancelled while others landed at airports in other cities including Dusseldorf, Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. Dozens more at Belgium’s regional airports also were cancelled or changed.
Reuters reported that Belgocontrol had rebooted some systems and was at 20 percent capacity by early afternoon, allowing some flights to continue. It was unknown when Belgian airspace would fully reopen, Reuters reported.Airliners overflying Belgium higher than 24,500 feet weren’t affected by the outage as those flights are under Europe-wide air traffic control systems. The last major European ATC outage was reported in December, when a computer glitch disrupted flights at London’s Heathrow Airport.
