Steve Nichols/DUBAI
With the Year 2000 less than 50 days away the airline industry is feverishly putting the finishing touches to its Y2K 'millennium bug' programmes.
Analysts point to Turkey, Egypt, India and South Africa as being the worst-prepared regions, although IATA Director General Pierre Jeanniot reports that: "Excellent progress on Year 2000 readiness in all regions has been reported to IATA."
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Shock news that Germany has been named as one of the least-prepared countries has been rejected this week by DFS, the country's air traffic authority.
Navigation and safety systems in German skies will function normally when 1999 changes to 2000, but plumbing, lighting and even telecommunications could pose a problem it says.
Even a power cut could have far-reaching effects, as seen last year at Toronto's Pearson International Airport.
The DFS says its own computers are ready, but air travel could be disturbed by issues beyond its control.
Lufthansa and Frankfurt Airport, together with DFS, two weeks ago flew journalists in a one-hour circular flight from Frankfurt and back to Frankfurt with its on-board clocks wound forward to simulate the date change to 1 January 2000.
Here in the UAE, the Department of Civil Aviation has set up a national air traffic management centre, based in Abu Dhabi, to deal with any "unusual incidents" in the 14 crucial hours.
Further afield, the Asia-Pacific office of the ICAO says that it is confident that the major carriers in the region are prepared, although analysts at Merrill Lynch are less confident, saying most Asian companies are still working on their Y2K programmes.
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Some companies are taking no chances. Matsushita, Japan's largest consumer electronics maker, has banned its 280,000 employees from making business trips by air at the end of this year according to a company spokesman. Interestingly, Matsushita is avionics giant Honeywell's partner for In Flight Entertainment projects.
But many carriers are cancelling flights, not through fears of the Y2K bug biting, but through lack of demand.
Source: Flight Daily News
