Planes Grounded, Four Separation Incidents Reported

A severed telecommunications cable caused some tense moments in the skies over South Florida Monday.

Air traffic controllers experienced a temporary outage when a telecommunications cable between Air Route Traffic Control Centers in Florida and Puerto Rico was cut. Controllers were forced to ground some flights. They also report at least four instances where planes almost violated the FAA's separation criteria (five miles spacing horizontally, 1,000 feet vertically.)

The outage lasted about an hour. The FAA maintains no flights were in danger, as a backup system was activated shortly after.

"There was never a loss of communication with flights and controllers did not lose their radar displays," FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen told the Associated Press.

Steven Wallace, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association in Miami, disagrees. He says the outage caused confusion and tension among Miami Center controllers, who had trouble identifying planes as flight plan information wasn't available.

Around 60 flights around Florida and the Bahamas were delayed for about 30 minutes because of the outage.

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