The Federal Aviation Administration is reporting that a software-based communication problem in their Atlanta office was the cause of massive flight delays and cancellations in the US on Tuesday.
According to the FAA’s official web site, nearly 40 major airports around the country had substantial delays, causing air traffic to back up, and stranding many passengers in airports from coast to coast. The Associated Press is reporting that the software glitch posed no safety or security threat, and that air to ground communication between flight towers and pilots was not affected by the incident.
As of Wednesday, FAA officials did not know the exact number of flights that were affected by the problem, but the organization’s web site listed 36 major airports with substantial delays on Tuesday.
A spokesperson for the FFA indicated that the massive delays Tuesday were caused by the communication failure in the agency’s Atlanta bureau. The software responsible for relaying flight information from the Atlanta facility to the FAA’s Salt Lake City facility failed, requiring flight plans and other information to be manually transferred.
The manual transfer of flight information ended up taking hours to complete, resulting in massive flight delays, and a few cancellations. According to the Associated Press, there were no communication problems involving planes landing — the problem only affected the departure times of scheduled flights.
Flights departing from New York and Chicago saw dozens of delays, with most scheduled departures leaving 30 minutes to one hour late. Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta was hit hardest by the communication breakdown, with most flights averaging delays of two hours or more on Tuesday evening.
But this is by no means the first time the FAA’s Atlanta facility has been shut down because of technical problems. A similar software glitch occurred in June of 2007, causing hundreds of flights to be delayed and canceled nationwide. An FAA spokesperson insists that the communication problem Tuesday was the result of a different software issue, and not a recurring theme indicating a larger problem within the system.
The agency has pledged to investigate the software failure though, and perform a forensic-type examination to determine exactly what went wrong. So far, the FAA is insistent that the problem was caused by an integral software failure, and was not the result of any outside hacker attack.
Worryingly, a computer hardware problem at the same Georgia facility caused a brief disruption in the processing of commercial flight plans just last week. The FAA says that over one hundred flights were delayed by the similar, but unrelated communications problem.
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It is pretty clear that flying is no longer fun, exciting ….and is more like frustrating, upsetting and expensive…What alternatives??/ a bus, a train, a car….Not too good…So what are we going to do…I hear at least one horror story per week of horrible customer service…or lack there of…Carol stanley author of For Kids 59.99 and Over.
Comment by carol stanley — August 29, 2008 @ 2:15 pm