Radio failure temporarily affects communications at Denver Air Traffic Control Center

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating a radio failure at the Denver Air Traffic Control Center, which covers approximately 285,000 square miles of airspace covering parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. The outage temporarily affected communications Monday.

According to the FAA, both transmitters that cover a segment of airspace went down around 1:50 p.m., causing a loss of communications to part of the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center for about 90 seconds. The FAA said the outage affected some flights approaching Denver International Airport.

They said the controllers used another frequency to communicate with pilots, and that all aircraft remained safely separated. Officials said the outage did not impact operations.

National attention was recently brought to the country's aging air traffic control system after a communications glitch at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. The FAA blamed equipment outages and staffing levels for the incident, stating, "Our antiquated air traffic control system is affecting our workforce."

Last week, President Trump announced his administration wants to replace technology at thousands of air traffic control sites.

"After decades of originally — and we're talking about a long time ago — reliable service, air traffic control is long overdue for, not an overhaul really, for a remaking," Trump said. "It's got to be brought up to a modern standard."

Officials said the plans include building six new air traffic coordination centers and replacing technology at over 4,600 air traffic control sites. The administration's plan includes buying 25,000 new radios, installing 4,000 new high-speed network connections, and replacing over 600 radars.

Aviation industry representatives said the plan would cost at least $30 billion to implement.

Editor's note: A previous version of the story misstated where the outage happened. It was at the Denver Air Traffic Control Center, not at Denver International Airport's air traffic control.

Fun story - from back 30 years ago.
Waiting on a flight home. ATC center was LA if I remember right.

FAA had a massive comms collapse - radios, radar, IFF, all down. Decided late afternoon I wasn’t going anywhere so got a room for the night.

Find out later....

The center had replaced the software that controlled all the links and control circuitry. The software ran on ms windows. There was a known bug in windows that caused the primary failure - seems the clock overflowed at 47 days. The fix for the problem was to go and restart the computers once a month. The control computers didn’t get reset. Yeah Stupid.

There’s more. microsoft had known about the kernel clock problem and had advised all users to use a separate clock embedded in a system utility that did not have the error. The control software writers used the broken kernel clock anyway. Sure enough - bad clock, no reset, the whole thing came crashing down. Yup - More Stupid.

Don’t remember how long it took to fix; I was in bed.

Proves (sorta) two things.

Big failures usually occur because two or more small problems will eventually collide and cause a big awcrap.

You can’t fix Stupid. (with thanks to Ron White.)

Last piece:
Describing a Windows clock overflow error:
“and yes, 49.7 is an approximate value...”
The exact value is 49 and 59,929/84,375 days, or 49 days, 17 hours, 2
minutes, and 47.296 seconds (exact).
Hey, news for nerds, what did you expect...
— AK Marc (707885), /.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.