Fergie's Tech Blog

FAA Telecom Outage Reported at New Atlanta Tower

Aliya Sternstein writes on FCW.com:

A telecommunications system at the new Atlanta air traffic control tower went down for four-and-a-half hours on the morning of June 9 and caused three flight delays, according to officials at the Federal Aviation Administration’s employee union, Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS).

However, officials at Harris, the contractor that installed the network, said the interruption caused no safety issues or flight delays. They blamed the outage on a maintenance interruption to the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure (FTI) service.

Because data services were down, air traffic controllers had to fax flight plans between air traffic control facilities and the tower, and then handwrite information on flight strips.

posted by Fergie @ 6/13/2006 08:08:00 PM