FAA Computer Glitch
WASHINGTON — 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.
read full article : Backlog of Flight Delays After Computer Problems
nytimes.com
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