WASHINGTON -- A failure early Thursday morning of a system that feeds flight plans to air traffic controllers snarled thousands of flights in the eastern United States. By midmorning the system was working again, but the backlog caused widespread airport delays. The system, the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, located in Atlanta with a backup in Salt Lake City, was a casualty of another failure in the tightly linked air traffic data system, a Federal Aviation Administration official said Thursday. The same system failed in August 2008, but it was not clear if the cause was the same this time. The result, however, was clear. Flight plans typically consist of hundreds of alpha-numeric characters, giving the flight number, type of equipment, takeoff location and various intermediate points, with altitudes. On Thursday airlines were faxing flight plans to controllers, who were typing that data on keyboards, not quite hunt-and-peck but not nearly as fast as a computer would transfer the information.When the system failed, it took another with it, the one that sorts through "notices to airmen," or F.A.A. alerts about short-lived problems, like equipment failures or runway closings, and delivers them to pilots.
WASHINGTON -- A failure early Thursday morning of a system that feeds flight plans to air traffic controllers snarled thousands of flights in the eastern United States. By midmorning the system was working again, but the backlog caused widespread airport delays.
The system, the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, located in Atlanta with a backup in Salt Lake City, was a casualty of another failure in the tightly linked air traffic data system, a Federal Aviation Administration official said Thursday. The same system failed in August 2008, but it was not clear if the cause was the same this time. The result, however, was clear.
Flight plans typically consist of hundreds of alpha-numeric characters, giving the flight number, type of equipment, takeoff location and various intermediate points, with altitudes. On Thursday airlines were faxing flight plans to controllers, who were typing that data on keyboards, not quite hunt-and-peck but not nearly as fast as a computer would transfer the information.
When the system failed, it took another with it, the one that sorts through "notices to airmen," or F.A.A. alerts about short-lived problems, like equipment failures or runway closings, and delivers them to pilots.
