ZJX Lost Nine Radar Facilities, Half Its Radio Frequencies

ANN REALTIME UPDATE 11.09.07 2050 EDT: NATCA spokesman Doug Church tells ANN Jacksonville Center is back up and running normal operations, following a 50-minute communications and radar outage earlier this afternoon that created some tense moments, with air traffic controllers in most of the facility left without the ability to talk to aircraft or even see aircraft on their scopes.

The outage also caused a number of delays involving aircraft headed to and from the lower Southeastern United States, including Florida. The outage, which NATCA believes was caused by human error at the local Jacksonville-area office of a major telecommunications company that provides the infrastructure to the FAA, began at approximately 12:40 pm EST and ended at approximately 1:30 pm EST.

"We watched airplanes fly through our airspace with no means of communicating with them," said Jacksonville Center’s NATCA Facility Representative, Dave Cook. The facility lost nine of its 16 radar sites and half of its radio frequencies, according to Cook.

Making matters worse, Cook added, was the fact that the FAA prohibits controllers from having cell phones in the control room. Therefore, communications to other air traffic control facilities to notify them of aircraft headed to and from their airspace was severely limited.

Cook said it does not appear that any incidents of losses of minimum separation occurred. However, he added, there were numerous incidents of what are called "deviations," which means controllers in neighboring facilities to ZJX received no advance notification of aircraft that suddenly showed up in their airspace... which is a major potential safety problem.

Original Report

1420 EST: The National Air Traffic Controllers Association tells ANN controllers at Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center have lost all of their radio frequencies -- used to communicate with pilots -- and also their landline phone communications to communicate with other air traffic control facilities.

As a result, the FAA has ordered a ground stop for Jacksonville Center, which means all aircraft whose route of flight takes them into Jacksonville Center's airspace are now holding on the ground at their departure airports.

According to the FAA, the ground hold is affecting airports including Orlando, Washington DC, Newark, and Atlanta. Jacksonville Center is the nation's seventh-busiest en-route center.

ZJX handles airspace extending west to roughly the Florida-Alabama border, south to Orlando, north to southern Georgia, northeast to roughly the North Carolina-South Carolina border, and out into the Atlantic Ocean, handling major north-south air routes for traffic coming to and from Florida and the Northeastern United States.

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