US Federal Aviation Administration Glitch Causes Airline Delays
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A computer glitch that caused flight cancellations and delays across the U.S. Thursday has been resolved, the Federal Aviation Administration said, but it was unclear how long flights would be affected.
Many of the nation's airports weren't encountering departure delays as of early afternoon, according to the FAA's air-traffic command center. But major delays were reported in Washington, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.
The problem involved FAA computer systems in Salt Lake City and Atlanta that handle automated flight plans, forcing air-traffic controllers to revert to the much more time-consuming approach of entering flight plans by hand.
That produced a "domino effect" delaying flights around the country, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association said. Spokesman Doug Church said controllers were entering flight plans manually in some locations even after the glitch was fixed.
The FAA system is a major, cutting-edge program full of redundancies that are designed to keep it from going down. As such, the problem is quite different from localized radio communication or computer problems the FAA suffers from time to time.
The FAA said the problem started between 5:15 and 5:30 a.m. and affected mostly flight plans but also traffic management, such as ground stops and ground delays.
Flight delays began on the East Coast and rippled out to the west. The problem didn't affect radar coverage or communications with planes in the air, the FAA said. The air-traffic controllers union, however, said the FAA systems that provide information on weather and wind speeds at airports weren't functioning.