round and round we go...
I thought the latest info about the Air Traffic Control Center failure is worth posting here, after finding out this latest info -- the radio AND the radars failed. They didn't tell us, so as not to panic people.
System Failure Snarls Air Traffic in the Southland (Radio AND Radar were out)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1216468/posts
As many as 800 commercial airline flights bound for Southern California were diverted and all takeoffs from the Southland's major airports were halted after radio and radar equipment failed for 3½ hours at a major air traffic control center in the Mojave Desert on Tuesday.
A computer glitch at 4:40 p.m. apparently caused the radio and radar failures at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, which handles cruise-altitude air traffic across Southern California and most of Arizona and Nevada, an area of about 178,000 square miles.
Without warning, radios went dead and radar screens went blank. An official with the air traffic controllers union, Hamid Ghaffari, said a seldom-used backup system came up "for a couple of minutes, and then it failed too."
Exactly what went wrong was not immediately determined.
About 8:15 p.m., the radar and radios came back in service.