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Wednesday, May 2, 2001

Computer Glitch Delays Flights Over Southland

By DAVID PIERSON, Times Staff Writer

Air traffic controllers were forced to delay flights in Southern California up to an hour Tuesday morning after the Los Angeles Center in Palmdale experienced computer problems, the Federal Aviation Administration reported. The glitch on the computer that tracks flights in Southern California and parts of Arizona and Nevada posed no serious danger in the sky, said Jerry Snyder an FAA spokesman.

"They immediately went to the backup computer," Snyder said. "There were some ground stoppages and delays at nearby airports. The protocol is to scale back [the number of planes in the sky] when your main computer is down."

The problem, which occurred at 4 a.m., was fixed four hours later, he said. It is unclear whether the problem was caused by the center's computer programs or equipment, but it scrambled data on incoming and outgoing flights.

A similar incident with the center's software occurred in October. Several hundred flights were delayed and 70 flights were canceled in a shutdown of the Palmdale computer systems that lasted four hours.

http://www.latimes.com/communities/news/north_san_fernando_valley/20010502/t000037051.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 02, 2001