Passenger planes from Portuguese carrier TAP and Ethiopian Airlines were involved in a near-miss over the Democratic Republic of Congo, government sources said Saturday. "Very alarming information in my possession indicates (there was) a very high risk of disaster in the airspace of our country," Transport Minister Cherubin Okende Senga said in a letter seen by AFP. He said the incident occurred on Wednesday and involved two aircraft of Ethiopian Airlines and TAP on international flights "which narrowly avoided colliding at the intersection of two air routes above" the city of Lubumbashi. It said the near-miss occurred "because of the lack of communication between the crews and the Lubumbashi airport", according to the letter dated May 20 and addressed to the director of the country's air transport authority, the RVA. The Ethiopian airliner was headed from Addis Ababa to Windhoek in Namibia, and the TAP jet was flying to Lisbon from the Mozambican capital of Maputo. "The two routes converged above LUB (Lubumbashi). The two planes were already in the non-separation zone for less than 10 minutes." He warned that the relay antennas in the towns of Kalemie and Kamina could be down. Given the "risks of disaster", the minister called for reports into the incident and into "the whole situation of regarding airspace" in the DRC.<br/>
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Personal data of about 4.5m passengers of Air India was leaked in a cyber attack on the airline’s data processor but the compromised servers were later secured, the Indian state-run carrier said. The debt-laden airline, a member of global airlines consortium Star Alliance, said the breach involved personal data, such as name, contact, passport, ticket and credit card details, registered between Aug 2011 and Feb 2021. No passwords were affected. Air India's data processor, SITA PSS (Passenger Service System), had in recent months informed the airline about a cyber attack it faced in February, following which the Indian airline investigated the matter and secured compromised servers. "Our data processor (SITA) has ensured that no abnormal activity was observed after securing the compromised servers," the airline said late Friday. SITA, which serves the Star Alliance of airlines, had in March said it had faced a "highly sophisticated" cyber-attack after which it initiated containment measures. It was not immediately clear if any other airlines were affected by the incident SITA reported in March.<br/>