Fallas en sistema de control de Vuelos en EUA

Los Angeles Times dijo:

East Coast air traffic control failure affects flights nationwide

By Alan Zibel, Associated Press
03:39 PM PDT, June 08, 2007

A cascading computer failure in the nation's air-traffic control system caused severe flight delays and some cancellations along the East Coast today.

A computer system in Atlanta that processes pilots' flights plans and sends them to air-traffic controllers failed early Friday, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Diane Spitaliere said. In response, 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. Airlines experienced thousands of delays, some lasting several hours, in what was shaping up to be one of the country's worst days this year for air travel.

Southwest experienced delays on about 40% of its 3,300 daily flights — the majority due to the air-traffic control problems, said Linda Rutherford, a spokeswoman for the airline.

Some JetBlue flights were delayed as long as four hours, said spokesman Bryan Baldwin, and the problem is likely to continue into the evening. The company, which has a hub at JFK, experienced delays at five out of its 16 daily flights at LaGuardia, he 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 New York's LaGuardia departures being hit the hardest.

Betsy Talton, a spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines, said the Atlanta-based airline was experiencing delays of roughly two hours Friday in the Northeast, but she attributed the backlog to thunderstorms.

Although the computer malfunctions were fixed shortly before 11 a.m. Friday, their effect lingered on into the late afternoon, especially in New York, where computer systems took two extra hours to connect with the central system in Atlanta, the FAA said. Spitaliere said the flight delays in the rest of the country were not as severe.

Hundreds of flights in both directions were delayed for two to three hours at LaGuardia, John F. Kennedy International and Newark Liberty International airports, said Steve Coleman, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn., said the problem forced controllers to enter flight information manually, which he described as a time-consuming practice. "With some of these East Coast airports, nothing is getting in right now," Church said Friday afternoon.

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AeroDF747 dijo:

Ya enserio, según lo que dice El Universal, los vuelos de México a E.U. son los más afectados y me surgieron unas dudas: Porque no afecta esto a los vuelos que vienen de E.U. para acá? es porque la afectación es para los que entran a su espacio aéreo? esta falla no llega a afectar a los vuelos que nada mas están "de pasada" y no aterrizan en E.U. como los que su destino final es Canadá?

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