Fergie's Tech Blog

Outage in Air Traffic System Causes Groundings, Confusion

Ina Paiva Cordle writes in The Miami Herald:

An underwater telecommunications cable failure at an air traffic control facility in San Juan disrupted the computer systems at the controllers' center in Miami for 55 minutes on Monday, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said.

The Miami center had to switch to a back-up system from 12:35 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., which made the controllers' jobs more complicated, said Steven Wallace, president of the Miami Center branch of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union for air traffic controllers.

During that time, the FAA did not allow planes to take off or land at the airports covered by the Miami center, including those in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Tampa, Orlando, Fort Myers, Key West and the Bahamas, Bergen said.

posted by Fergie @ 12/05/2006 12:22:00 PM