"We Couldn't Do Anything"

Pandemonium reigned in towers, dispatch offices and ATC centers throughout the West Tuesday when a computer goof caused radar and radio failure at the Los Angeles ARTCC. Controllers said they immediately tried to bring the back-up system online -- but it, too, failed.

We couldn't do anything," said Hamid Ghaffari, local president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. He said controllers watched helplessly as aircraft closed in on each other, without knowing there was no controller helping maintain separation.

"We can't do our job unless there is communication. If there are no communications, you are helpless," Ghaffari said.

The breakdown stranded thousands of passengers on hundreds of flights across the country. LAX was shut down for the night not long after the 1640 PDT outage.

"When you have a failure of this magnitude, you are bound to have a chaotic situation, because you have no ability to talk to aircraft under your control," Ghaffari told the LA Times. "You have to use an actual phone and call another facility outside of ours and have them switched over to other air traffic facilities."

He said the Voice Switching and Communications System has been a stalwart of ATC operations. "It's been one of the great assets of the FAA," he said. "Up until today."

Ghaffari said, without ARTCC to guide aircraft into and out of the LA area, flight crews had to depend on their own collision avoidance systems. "That was the hero of the night," he said.

Not Again

It was, according to the LA Times, the latest in a series of problems to plague the ARTCC, based in the California desert near Palmdale.

• In 1986, 38 controllers there were ordered to stand down during an investigation into allegations of drug use.
• In 1991, flights at LAX, Burbank, Long Beach and Orange County were delayed because of a computer failure.
• A 1996 radar failure delayed hundreds of flights throughout the region.
• In September, 1998, according to NATCA leaders, two aircraft barely avoided a mid-air after a cable cut silenced all communications between controllers and pilots.
• An August, 1999 failure of a new computer system delayed flights in both California and Nevada for up to 90 minutes.
• A year later, hundreds of flights across the country were affected by a huge problem in new software being installed at the facility.
• Then, in 2001, yet another computer problem caused regional flight delays of up to an hour.

The nation's air traffic was reportedly back at full capacity by 0800 PDT Wednesday morning.

FMI: www.laartcc.org/index.php