Flights halted nationwide by radar system failure in West

Jeff Wilson

Friday, Oct. 20, 2000 | 10:28 a.m.

In Las Vegas

During the hour and 40 minutes that FAA computer equipment was off line Thursday, 40 flights at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas were delayed or canceled.

Airport officials said the problem produced a ripple effect that affected arrival and departure times all day. Many Los Angeles-bound flights -- a route dominated by Southwest Airlines and United Airlines -- were grounded as a result of the computer failure.

McCarran spokeswoman Debbie Millett said airlines were catching up with the delays by around noon after the system failure at 6:50 a.m.

Several monitors at McCarran gave passengers the news that flights were either canceled or delayed, but some airlines warned customers of "possible weather delays" on their flights to California.

LOS ANGELES -- Nearly 100,000 airline passengers throughout the Southwest waited hours for delayed or canceled flights caused by repeated failures of the radar system used to guide aircraft through the region.

A backup system took over immediately and there were no safety problems for about 100 aircraft in flight at the time of Thursday's emergency, said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Jerry Snyder.

But by the time the FAA could restore things to normal more than four hours later, airports nationwide were gridlocked with aircraft on the ground, flights were canceled and thousands of passengers were stranded or delayed.

About 75,000 of those passengers were at Los Angeles International Airport, where weight-loss guru Richard Simmons sought to entertain weary people with banter and dancing after his flight arrived about an hour late from Philadelphia.

"I could have been in Paris eating cold oysters by now," Simmons said.

Los Angeles International averages 100 arrivals and departures hourly involving 150 aircraft, said spokeswoman Nancy Castles. For five hours ending at about noon, every one of the flights was canceled or delayed, she said.

"It was very disruptive and it had a domino effect," Castles said, adding most of the backlog was absorbed during the airport's less busy 2 p.m. through 7 p.m. operations.

"By 7 p.m. we had no major problems, just a handful of airlines that had very tight schedules that were unable to address the backup," she said.

Failures at the FAA's Los Angeles Center facility in the Mojave Desert followed a software upgrade Wednesday night. The facility houses air traffic controllers who guide flights through a 100,000-square-mile area.

"This was a standard upgrade. Something is corrupting the system," said the FAA's Snyder. "It's worked for 17 other systems but isn't working here."

The radar system at Los Angeles Center, 60 miles north of downtown in the Mojave Desert community of Palmdale, covers a huge section of the Southwest, including most of California, parts of Nevada and Utah, and out to sea 250 miles.

There were many tense moments after it went down. At one point, there was no more room at Los Angeles International and flights from Australia were sent to Las Vegas.

"Every flight in and out of our sector was affected," said Garth Koleszar, National Air Traffic Controllers Association local vice president.

Asked if there were any safety concerns, he said: "Any time you use a system that isn't the best that we have, I feel there is a degradation."

The backup system doesn't have the automatic feature that passes off planes from one regional controller to another. It requires a controller to manually type out flight information and pass along information by telephone.

The first main computer outage lasted 100 minutes, from 6:50 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., and led to what was called a Tier 1 ground stop, meaning Southern California-bound aircraft west of the Mississippi couldn't take off.

The computer went down again at 9 a.m. and a Tier 2 ground stop was ordered, halting planes on the ground nationwide.

The computer was restored again at 11:15 a.m. using the old software program, and the FAA ordered the Tier 2 ground stop lifted incrementally throughout the day to meter the flow of aircraft.

Southwest Airlines canceled 70 flights, airline spokesman Melanie Jones said from Dallas. A San Francisco International Airport spokesman, Ron Wilson, said about 20 flights were grounded during the first outage alone, and United Airlines canceled 32 flights into and out of San Francisco during the day.