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Weather radar system faces outages

File photograph by Akil Simmons

The Bermuda Airport Authority is working to address “unacceptable” outages of its recently updated $2 million Doppler weather radar system.Since the new radar system was installed, it has suffered seven unplanned outages, most of which have been blamed on a hardware component failure.A spokeswoman for the BAA said: “The Airport Authority has notified the manufacturer Leonardo Germany that the performance of the weather radar system is unacceptable.”She added that the system is still under the manufacturer’s warranty.Lester Nelson, the BAA CEO, said: “The system has failed to meet design performance standards and our expectations, which is disappointing given the full due diligence, time and effort by our team and our obligation to deliver value to the public on the weather radar project.“We continue to work with Leonardo Germany to identify and resolve the radar system’s technical issues to ensure that the radar is available for at least 95 per cent of the system’s 15-year life.“The airport authority asks the public for its patience while we work to improve the reliability of the weather radar system.Mr Nelson concluded: “We will continue to provide updates as we resolve this challenge.”The updated weather radar system formally launched in July after the previous system, installed in 2004, became increasingly unreliable.Leonardo Germany was selected to carry out the upgrades after a tendering process.