Italy probes multiple airport radar failure

Italy launched an investigation yesterday into radar failures at a Milan airport this week which raised suspicions of sabotage and left flights grounded across the north of the country.

The inquiry follows radar blackouts on Wednesday and Thursday at Linate airport, where radar failure was a factor in Italy's worst air crash which killed 118 people in 2001.

"We cannot be sure it wasn't sabotage," Linate technician Giulio Santoro was quoted as saying in La Stampa newspaper.

Police seized two generators that experts say should have prevented the failures.

"The news was extremely serious because there's the risk of accidents. The radar failure affected all airports in that flight zone - Linate, Malpensa, Bergamo, Turin, Genoa," said Captain Antonio Pellegrino, spokesman for Italy's National Agency for Flight Safety.

"Usually, when there's a power failure, the emergency generator is supposed to automatically switch on, and it didn't."

Flights returned to normal yesterday, Italy's air traffic control authority said, adding that its technicians were still investigating the cause of the blackout.

The radar went down for several minutes at least twice on Thursday and once on Wednesday. Some 70 Alitalia planes were grounded on Thursday at Linate alone.

"Maybe it's just a feeling, but two simultaneous glitches in the space of a few hours is atypical. Definitely atypical," Mr Santoro told La Stampa.

In 2001, a private Cessna jet and a Copenhagen-bound SAS plane collided in heavy fog on a runway at Linate, killing all 104 passengers and six crew on the Scandinavian Airlines plane. Four people on the Cessna and four on the ground also died.

The disaster uncovered several safety shortcomings including the lack of a working ground radar system.