|
FAA: Glitch hits Atlanta and SLC systems, triggers nationwide flight delays
Nov 19, 2009 (The Salt Lake Tribune - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
A third-party technical glitch is now believed to have affected the Federal Aviation Administration flight plan processing computer system Thursday, resulting in commercial air traffic delays nationwide.
Salt Lake International Airport was not immune to the FAA's woes, either, said airport operations spokeswoman Barbara Gann, though she said the impact locally was negligible, at least initially.
As of 11 a.m., no outbound flights from Utah's primary air portal had been delayed, but the state capital's terminals were bracing for the potential impact of the flight-processing slowdown by early afternoon.
"Right now, all the outbound flights are leaving normally. So far, we've only had a couple flights [from the East coast] arriving late, but that's not too unusual," Gann said.
Mike Fergus, an FAA spokeswoman in Renton, Wash., said investigators had ruled out that its National Airspace Data Interchange Network (NADIN) was directly to blame for the delays, as initially thought. Instead, the working theory as of late Thursday morning was that an outside Internet pipeline serving the system had failed.
"We now suspect that it was an I.P. [Internet Protocol] router from which we take a lot of flight information" that was where the problem originated, Fergus said. "Nothing's been determined, but that's what they are looking at now."
Fergus had no further information on that router's location, or its operator.
Though
based in Atlanta, the NADIN system also has a site at the FAA's facilities in Salt Lake City. The FAA said the Utah NADIN continued to operate after Atlanta went down, though it, too, was eventually overwhelmed when Atlanta's workload was switched over.
"The system is now fine [at both locations]," Fergus said. He emphasized that while "air traffic controllers had to input the [flight] information manually" and that resulted in "massive inconvenience in terms of time ... safety was never an issue here."
Bottom line, Fergus stressed: "The problem lies outside the [NADIN] system."
Delta Airlines, which operates a major hub at Salt Lake International Airport, reported "significant" delays in its traffic early Thursday. However, the FAA kept in contact with flights already in the air, and some planes were being dispatched using non-automated, backup procedures, Delta noted.
The delays primarily affected flight information processing for the nation's East coast. However, as those flights reached their destinations further West, delayed arrivals were expected to spread throughout the nation.
In a statement released late Thursday morning, the FAA's office in Washington, D.C. said the glitch occurred about 7 a.m. MST, and was resolved four hours later. "Air traffic control radar and communication with aircraft were not affected during this time and critical safety systems remained up and running," the agency said.
Initially, the FAA believed the problem was software-oriented and originated with the NADIN system in Salt Lake City. Later, however, the focus of the agency's investigation turned to Atlanta and then the I.P. router delivering some flight information to NADIN.
To see more of The Salt Lake Tribune, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
http://www.sltrib.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Salt Lake Tribune Distributed by
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email
tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax
to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave.,
Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
[ Back To Homepage ]
|
Home
Featured Article Archives
eNews
RSS FEED
