Computer Failure Hamstrings U.S. Air Travel

Posted 11/19/2009 at 3:18pm | by Bart Salisbury

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Just keep telling yourself: “It’s the safest way to travel. It’s the safest way to travel.” Provided no one else is trying to occupy your exact same piece of airspace.

It didn’t happen, of course, but the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has reported that the system it uses to keep track of airlines’ flight plans sort-of, kind-of hiccuped, leading to the widespread flight cancellations and delays nationwide. This is the second instance of such a hiccup in the past 15 months.

The four to five hour downtime, cased by the failure of a single circuit board in a piece of networking equipment in Salt Lake City, prevented air traffic controllers around the country from talking with each other. Controllers had to manually type in complicated flight plans each time an plane entered their air space, and had to keep planes separated by greater distances, which lead to a slow down of flight capacity.

The outage was keenly felt on the east coast, with Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest, hardest hit. Washington National, Baltimore/Washington, and Newark Liberty airports also experienced severe flight delays. A few airlines have reported cancellations, with AirTran among the first with 22 flights cancelled and dozens delayed.

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