At the time passengers on one of the flights were told Oceania airspace was closed. Photo: Flight Radar
The country's air traffic controller says its chief executive mis-spoke, but did not mislead the public, when he pointed to another company after a major outage.
A glitch last month on services between New Zealand and Australia left five planes circling above Wellington and four others unable to take off.
At the time, Airways said it was caused by flight data not transferring from one system to another.
Chief executive James Young said in an interview on Morning Report that Airways was in talks with an external software provider about the fault.
Airways now says the agency itself maintained the software and had full responsibility, and its original maker has had no involvement in more than 20 years.
"The Airways Oceanic platform is one of the very few systems that Airways purchased but maintains with no input from the original vendor," it said in a statement.
Airways had extensively developed the software itself since taking it over, it said.
"The original vendor has had no involvement for more than two decades, and at no point have we suggested they were responsible for the disruption on August 16."
The agency said its chief executive spoke before its full relationship with the software vendor was clear.
"He mis-spoke in suggesting there had been contact with the vendor, and we acknowledge this error," Airways said.
"While he mis-spoke in one instance, this does not constitute misleading the public."
Airways said it would not be naming the software provider because it was not clear what contractual confidentiality agreements might still exist.
Minister expects full review
Minister for State Owned Enterprises Simeon Brown said he expected a full review of what happened during the incident as well as Airways' communications afterwards.
"Quite clearly their communication was lacking, and they need to be fully transparent about that. So that's the expectation we've set very clearly with Airways."
Brown said passengers were impacted, and it has a reputation on the work Airways does.
"Airways by and large does a great job, these incidents do happen from time to time. Our expectation is that they address those issues and fix them, learn from them, and also focus on their communications which were clearly lacking and inadequate during that incident."
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