Planes Flying Again After Computer Failure
A failure early Thursday morning of a system that feeds flight plans to air traffic controllers snarled thousands of flights in the eastern United States. By mid-morning the system was working again, but the backlog caused wide airport delays.
The same system failed in August 2008, but it was not clear if the cause was the same this time.
The system, the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, situated in Atlanta with a backup in Salt Lake City, was a casualty of another failure in the tightly linked, one official at the Federal Aviation Administration said. Technicians were still trying to determine the cause of the glitch.
The result was clear, however. Flight plans typically consist of hundreds of alpha-numeric characters, giving the flight number, the type of equipment, the place of takeoff, and various intermediate points, with altitudes. Controllers were entering them on keyboards, not quite hunt-and-peck but not nearly as fast as a computer would transfer the data.
When that system failed, it took another with it, the one that sorts through “notices to airmen,” or F.A.A. alerts about short-lived problems, like equipment failures or runway closing, and delivers them to pilots for whom they would be relevant.
At mid-morning, the F.A.A.’s on-line status board was showing the problem limited to the northeast, plus O’Hare. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association was predicting, “it may take many hours for the system to catch up.” The union added, “Airport efficiency is being cut by at least half in places like New York-JFK.”
Airlines reported problems in other areas as well. Around the country, planeloads of passengers heard pilots blame the air traffic system, as they sat on the tarmac. AirTran Airways, based in Orlando, Fla., quickly announced that passengers with tickets for Thursday could re-book without charge, as is commonly done in storms.
The F.A.A.’s data processing system has a variety of problems. While it was hailed as a mavel when new, much of it is written in obsolete computer language and the agency has been slow to provide updates. And with a requirement for perfect round-the-clock performance, parts of the system have crashed while technicians tried to install upgrades, like uninterruptable power supplies, or software fixes.
The F.A.A. did not immediately make clear what had gone wrong on Thursday morning.
