A power supply failure, which led to a fire alarm going off at the Christchurch radar centre, caused flight disruptions across New Zealand this afternoon.
Flights have since resumed after the incident, which saw smoke set off a fire alarm at Airway's Andy Herd Building.
A statement by Airways NZ outlined details of the incident which led to delays.
"The fire alarm was set off by smoke from one of our two Uninterrupted Power Supplies (UPS) which had failed. Therefore our radar and communications system reverted to back-up system mode.
"While Airways was able to continue to safely manage domestic airborne traffic, as the system was in back-up mode a conservative approach to managing New Zealand’s airspace was taken, which included halting departures within New Zealand airspace.
"Our airborne international flights were unaffected as our main Oceanic control centre is independently managed from Auckland.
"By 2pm we had identified the cause of the issue and by 2.15pm our operations were running normally on mains power supply with back-up, and normal operations had resumed (domestic flights were departing once again)."
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