Washington – A computer failure in the nation’s air-traffic-control system caused severe flight delays today along the East Coast, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
A computer system in Atlanta that processes pilots’ flights plans and sends them to air-traffic controllers failed late Thursday or early today, FAA spokeswoman Diane Spitaliere said.
The agency rerouted the system’s functions to another computer in Salt Lake City, which overloaded due to the increased volume of data, magnifying the problem.
The FAA could not immediately calculate the number of flight delays caused by the problem, which was made worse by bad weather, Spitaliere said.
Although the computer problem was fixed shortly before 11 a.m., its impact lingered on into the late afternoon, especially in New York, where it took two extra hours for computer systems to get back online, Spitaliere said. She said the flight delays in the rest of the country were not as severe.
Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said the problem forced controllers to enter flight information manually, which he called a time-consuming practice. “With some of these East Coast airports, nothing is getting in right now,” Church said.
American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner acknowledged the computer troubles and said the nation’s largest carrier experienced about 50 cancellations on the East Coast, with departures in New York City’s LaGuardia airport hardest hit.
Betsy Talton, a spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines, said the Atlanta-based airline was experiencing delays of roughly two hours in the Northeast, but she attributed the backlog to thunderstorms.
