FAA computer glitch causes widespread delays

The disruption of hundreds of commercial airline flights for as long as four hours last week was caused by a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) computer breakdown, one that actually involved a simple router in Salt Lake City that went offline without a backup kicking in. The Nov. 19 incident, showing the IT vulnerabilities faced by the FAA, involved the national flight plan filing system. According to officials, the faulty router in Utah was not able to default to a backup. This led to the shutdown of a second major system node in Hampton, Ga.

As a result, there was a halt to the inputting of flight plans filed by U.S. commercial pilots. Commercial aircraft cannot take off from a U.S. airport without filing a flight plan. Hundreds of aircraft and thousands of passengers were thrown off schedule as pilots sought to file flight plans manually.

A report by eWeek.com said that when the Salt Lake router went offline, only government contractor Harris knew that the backup card was not immediately available and a single technician had access to where it was kept.

The FAA had to wait until the technician could come to the site to replace the faulty card inside the router, and reconfigure the software. Sounds like a bureacratic nightmare, doesn't it?

Union officials maintain that if FAA personnel ran the system instead of a contractor, there would have been a quicker resolution of the problem. The FAA said it will meet with Harris officials to discuss the incident and other issues.

In a statement, Harris said the company is working with the FAA to evaluate the interruption to prevent similar outages. It said the network has "proven to be one of the most reliable and secure communications networks operating within the civilian government."

For more on the outage:
- see this eWeek com article
- see this New York Times article

Related Articles:
Air traffic control systems vulnerable
FAA puts bird strike data online