Problem Grounds All Traffic Within 250 Miles

A problem traced to a faulty phone line resulted in significant air travel delays across the southeastern US Tuesday, as all airline traffic within 250 miles of Memphis, TN was grounded for hours.

The Associated Press reports the problem at the Memphis Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) forced controllers in adjacent airspace to clear all high-altitude traffic from the region.

"The airspace was completely cleared by 1:30 (p.m.) Eastern time," said FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen.

A 100,000-square-mile chunk of airspace was affected -- including sections over Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana -- according to Patrick Forrey, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

"A major communications failure is ongoing this afternoon at Memphis Center, leaving air traffic controllers without the ability to use most of their radio frequencies and some of their radar feeds as well," Forrey said in a statement to ANN. "They also have not been able to make automated “handoffs” of flights to adjacent airspace sectors at other en route facilities that border Memphis Center.

"This has been a major safety problem, as controllers, at the time of the outage around 11:30 am CDT, were thrust into an immensely chaotic situation in which they had to use personal cell phones to talk to other air traffic control facilities about specific flights that they could not communicate with themselves," he added.

The ripple effect led to cancellations and delays at some of the country's biggest airports... including Atlanta Hartsfield, Nashville, and Dallas/Fort Worth International.

"At this point our operations team and the airlines operations teams are obviously looking at the situation, and we're preparing for the eventuality that we might have to have guests," said DFW spokesman David Magana, adding 26 flights were held Tuesday afternoon, with another 49 cancelled.

The problem also affected operations for FedEx, based at Memphis International.

Bergen did not explain what caused the "failure in communications" Tuesday... but NATCA's Forrey says evidence points to outdated telecommunications equipment.

"The problem appears to have been caused by a failure of the telephone line that hosts the communications feeds to the facility," Forrey said, also noting a display of airborne traffic at the time showed a giant 'hole' around Memphis... "a bizarre sight," in his words.

FMI: www.faa.gov, www.natca.org