'Departure chaos' 11 airlines suspended ticketing during Incheon Airport network failure

It was confirmed that ticketing services for 11 Chinese airlines were halted due to a recent network failure that occurred at Incheon International Airport.

According to data received from Incheon International Airport Corporation by Rep. Hwang Hee of the Democratic Party of Korea on the 4th, there were a total of 11 airlines whose boarding process was delayed due to a network failure at Incheon Airport on the 30th of last month.

This is an increase of 8 from the 3 airlines that the corporation initially announced as having problems, and the same problem appeared in all Chinese airlines.

A connection failure occurred in the ticketing system (Travel Sky) used by these airlines around 12 noon on the same day, and recovery was completed at 5:08 p.m., about 5 hours later.

In the process, as of 5 p.m., 38 flights heading to Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Qingdao in China were delayed, causing great inconvenience to about 1,200 passengers.

This incident was triggered by a global network failure of the American airline network platform, AirLink (ARINC).

Starting at 4:30 a.m. that day, 44 Incheon Airport airlines using the Airlink network experienced communication instability and intermittent connection failures, causing primary disruption.

It is believed that a large amount of traffic was concentrated during the airlink network recovery process, leading to additional disruptions in the traffic control function of Chinese airline Travel Sky.

In fact, general ticketing services for 11 Chinese airlines stopped in the afternoon, and hand-written ticketing was limited to some passengers.

At the check-in counters of each airline, long lines of passengers waiting to leave the country formed, leading to extreme congestion and protests from some passengers.

At 2:42 p.m., the airlink failure was restored, but the Travel Sky failure continued for some time.

Among Chinese airlines, 9 resumed ticketing after system restoration, and the remaining 2 terminated boarding procedures.

It was reported that congestion at the departure hall continued until midnight that day as passengers were unable to check in for about five hours.

The corporation plans to hold a meeting with Airlink on the 5th to check the cause of the network failure, while strengthening monitoring of the airport check-in system and network.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport also plans to inspect manuals in case of ticketing system failures for each airline and review follow-up measures according to the results of the investigation into this incident.

At Incheon Airport, some flights were delayed due to a failure in the Ministry of Justice's Passenger Pre-Confirmation System (IPC) the morning before.

Rep. Hwang Hee said, “It is a serious matter that inconveniences to users are repeated due to system failures at Incheon International Airport, the gateway to Korea,” and added, “We must thoroughly investigate the cause and prepare measures to prevent recurrence.”