FAA Says Memphis ATC Outage Caused by AT&T
An AP newswire article by Dan Caterinicchia, via Google News, reports that:
AT&T Inc. manages the telephone line that went down at a Memphis air traffic control center causing nationwide airline delays Tuesday, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration told lawmakers.More here.
Acting FAA Administrator Bobby Sturgell said the communication equipment failure was a "BellSouth/AT&T problem" during a House subcommittee on aviation hearing exploring the recent run of record airline delays. He added that the agency was working with the company to address the issue.
"The service disruption was a result of equipment failure ... (and) the company is conducting a comprehensive investigation to determine the cause," according to a statement from AT&T that said no additional information was available. AT&T, which is based in San Antonio, acquired BellSouth Corp. last year.
The communications failure, which limited the center's ability to talk to flights passing through its airspace and to other air traffic control facilities for about three hours, shut down all airline traffic within 250 miles of Memphis.
(Props, The Consumerist.)
posted by Fergie @ 9/30/2007 11:41:00 AM
1 Comments:
Why didn't any of the 5 surrounding ARTCC centers assume that airspace. Don't you have any contingency plan?
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