Were there any recent threats about aircraft/West Coast prior to this incident?
This is from the "Final Phase" forum.
"Air Controllers Report Chaos, Near Misses, After Computer Failure"
10:31 a.m. September 15, 2004
L
OS ANGELES (AP) – In at least five cases, aircraft passed dangerously close to each other after a computer failure cut off radio contact between pilots and air traffic controllers for hours and forced the grounding of hundreds of flights throughout the country, a union official said Wednesday.
Two flights "were almost near-mid-air collisions," said Hamid Ghaffari, local president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
As planes traveled perilously close to one another, "We couldn't do anything," Ghaffari said, based on his interviews with on-duty controllers and a review of radar records.
"We can't do our job unless there is communication. If there are no communications, you are helpless," he said.
On-board safety equipment that includes a collision avoidance system allowed pilots to avoid potential disaster in the sky, he said.
"That was the hero of the night," he said.
After radio contact failed about 4:40 p.m. Tuesday at the Federal Aviation Administration facility in Palmdale, the control room "looked like complete chaos all over the place," Ghaffari said.
A backup computer system was activated but that also failed, he said.
Three workers filed on-the-job injury claims after becoming traumatized by watching flights veer toward one another on radar without being able to do anything, he said.
Under FAA "separation standards," planes are required to fly at least five miles apart horizontally and no less than 1,000 feet vertically. In at least five cases, that safety bubble was violated, and in two cases planes came within about two miles of each other, Ghaffari said.
Flights across much of the country resumed late Tuesday after repairs restored radio contact. But airports struggled to accommodate irked passengers who were forced to wait hours to board delayed flights.
At Los Angeles International Airport, the outage brought about 400 flights to a standstill. Two dozen flights at the Oakland International Airport and more than a dozen at Ontario International Airport also did not depart or arrive on time.
The delays caused a ripple effect throughout the country as planes bound for Los Angeles and other airports were held on the ground.
In all, planes were grounded for about three hours at airports in the Los Angeles region, northern California and parts of Nevada, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said.
The outage began at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale. The station, located in the desert north of Los Angeles, controls airspace for a vast region that encompasses California, Arizona, Nevada and parts of Utah.
Control of the airspace was turned over to other air traffic control facilities, including one in Albuquerque, N.M.
By 8 p.m. Tuesday, the FAA allowed flights to resume at 50 percent airport capacity so the facilities wouldn't be flooded with passengers, said Nancy Castles, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles International Airport.
Air travel reached full capacity by early Wednesday, said Diana Joubert, an FAA operations officer.
www.signonsandiego.com/ne...utage.html
About 800 planes were in the air at time of breakdown
Thursday, September 16, 2004 Posted: 0304 GMT (1104 HKT)
LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- A routine maintenance check wasn't performed on an air traffic control radio system serving much of the West, causing the system to shut down for five hours Tuesday, the FAA reported Wednesday.
The FAA has launched an investigation into why the maintenance wasn't performed.
Hundreds of planes were in the air at the time. Travel to and from multiple airports, primarily Los Angeles and San Diego, California, was disrupted.
The FAA said several planes came dangerously close.
Under FAA guidelines, planes are to be five miles apart horizontally and 2,000 feet vertically.
Pilots reported no near-misses, the agency said.
"The FAA is aggressively investigating Tuesday evening's radio communication outage," the FAA said in a statement. "Although FAA air traffic control systems have nearly perfect reliability, any system failure -- no matter how rare -- is unacceptable."
The FAA said radio contact was lost because routine maintenance was not performed on the primary and radio and voice communications with planes. When a check is not performed, it results in the system turning off.
A backup system that is to take over in such situations did not turn on because it was improperly configured.
"Our preliminary findings indicate that the outage was not the result of system reliability, but rather an event that should've been avoided," the FAA said.
The outage resulted in hundreds of flights being canceled, delayed or diverted, with the FAA imposing a ground stop for several hours at multiple airports, including Los Angeles International.
The center where the outage occurred controls air traffic for California, Arizona, Nevada and parts of Utah.
The FAA emphasized that only radio communications were lost to the planes and that radar coverage remained fully operational during the five-hour outage.
CNN's Mike Ahlers and Cary Bodenheimer contributed to this report.
Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TRAVEL/09/15/lax.outage/index.html
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Controllers: Chaos, Near-Misses During NORDO Incident
"We Couldn't Do Anything"
Pandemonium reigned in towers, dispatch offices and ATC centers
throughout the West Tuesday when a computer goof caused radar and
radio failure at the Los Angeles ARTCC. Controllers said they
immediately tried to bring the back-up system online -- but it,
too, failed.
We couldn't do anything," said Hamid Ghaffari, local president
of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. He said
controllers watched helplessly as aircraft closed in on each other,
without knowing there was no controller helping maintain
separation.
"We can't do our job unless there is communication. If there are
no communications, you are helpless," Ghaffari said.
The breakdown stranded thousands of passengers on hundreds of
flights across the country. LAX was shut down for the night not
long after the 1640 PDT outage.
"When you have a failure of this magnitude, you are bound to
have a chaotic situation, because you have no ability to talk to
aircraft under your control," Ghaffari told the LA Times. "You have
to use an actual phone and call another facility outside of ours
and have them switched over to other air traffic facilities."
He said the Voice Switching and Communications System has been a
stalwart of ATC operations. "It's been one of the great assets of
the FAA," he said. "Up until today."
Ghaffari said, without ARTCC to guide aircraft into and out of
the LA area, flight crews had to depend on their own collision
avoidance systems. "That was the hero of the night," he said.
Not Again
It was, according to the LA Times,
the latest in a series of problems to plague the ARTCC, based in
the California desert near Palmdale.
1) In 1986, 38 controllers there were ordered to stand down during
an investigation into allegations of drug use.
2) In 1991, flights at LAX, Burbank, Long Beach and Orange County
were delayed because of a computer failure.
3) A 1996 radar failure delayed hundreds of flights throughout the
region.
4) In September, 1998, according to NATCA leaders, two aircraft
barely avoided a mid-air after a cable cut silenced all
communications between controllers and pilots.
5) An August, 1999 failure of a new computer system delayed
flights in both California and Nevada for up to 90 minutes.
6) A year later, hundreds of flights across the country were
affected by a huge problem in new software being installed at the
facility.
7) Then, in 2001, yet another computer problem caused regional
flight delays of up to an hour.
The nation's air traffic was reportedly back at full capacity by
0800 PDT Wednesday morning.
FMI: www.laartcc.org/index.php
Source: ANN http://www.aero-news.net/news/genav.cfm?ContentBlockID=31bc65b1-0e82-4081-9884-bdb234553dbb&Dynamic=1
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Sky Harbor hit by California air traffic center shutdown
A communications problem forced cancellations and delays at various airports across the West on Tuesday night, including Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
"One of the communication centers in Southern California went down, so some aircraft out of Sky Harbor were not able to depart for California or Nevada Tuesday night," Deborah Ostreicher, Sky Harbor media relations, told Newsradio 620 KTAR's Jim Sharpe Wednesday. The Palmdale FAA center controls airspace in California and parts of Nevada.
Some passengers headed for Southern California and Nevada cities spent the night at the airport, while others made hotel reservations, or, if they were from the Valley, simply went home.
All airlines were affected by the system shutdown, forcing the cancellation of more than 100 flights.
Ostreicher said air traffic at Sky Harbor is recovering this morning, but encouraged passengers to contact the airlines for flight status.
And more advice from Ostreicher: "Give yourself extra time and you'll have a great day."
For more: www.phxskyharbor.com.
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Air controllers report chaos, near misses in West
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Airplanes passed dangerously close to each
other in at least five instances after a computer failure knocked out radio
contact between pilots and air traffic controllers across the West, a union
official said Wednesday.
Two flights during the outage Tuesday "were almost near-mid-air collisions,"
said Hamid Ghaffari, local president of the National Air Traffic Controllers
Association.
Three workers filed injury claims, saying they were traumatized by seeing
flights veer toward one another on radar without being able to do anything,
he said.
Federal Aviation Administration representatives did not immediately respond
to repeated calls for comment on Ghaffari's remarks.
Airport operations were back to normal Wednesday following the radio failure
at an FAA center at Palmdale, north of Los Angeles.
On Tuesday, hundreds of flights were grounded for up to about three hours at
airports in the Los Angeles region, Northern California and Nevada, the FAA
said.
During the outage, air traffic controllers could monitor planes on radar but
were unable to communicate with them. Pilots had to switch to another radio
frequency to communicate with other control centers that took over flights
in the region.
"We couldn't do anything," Ghaffari said. "We can't do our job unless there
is communication. If there are no communications, you are helpless."
Under FAA rules, planes must remain at least five miles apart horizontally
and 1,000 feet vertically. In at least five cases, that safety bubble was
violated, and in two cases planes came within about two miles of each other,
Ghaffari said.
On-board safety equipment that includes a collision-avoidance system helped
avert disaster, Ghaffari said.
"That was the hero of the night," he said.
Ghaffari said a backup computer system was activated, but it failed too.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TRAVEL/09/15/faa.outage.ap
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Study questions nuclear monitoring
Plants feared vulnerable to terrorism
By H. JOSEF HEBERT, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot independently verify that every nuclear power plant is taking required safeguards to protect itself against terrorism, congressional investigators said Tuesday.
Senior commission officials strongly challenged that assessment and said the agency, through on-site inspectors and other activities, is aggressively monitoring security compliance at the nation's 103 reactors at 65 sites.
The Government Accountability Office told a House subcommittee that the regulatory agency's monitoring of reactor security has been largely "a paper review" that falls short of assuring that industry security plans are meeting current, more-stringent requirements.
At the same time, the GAO, the auditing arm of Congress, said critical "force-on-force" mock attacks to physically test security at the plants will not be completed at all facilities until late 2007.
"It will take several more years for NRC to make an independent determination that each plant has taken reasonable and appropriate steps to protect against the threat presented," GAO investigator Jim Well told a House Government Reform security subcommittee.
NRC officials, who also testified before the panel, disputed the assessment and said the agency has increased inspection hours at the power plants fivefold, and has physically reviewed 80 percent of the security items that plant operators must address.
"We have inspectors [at the plants] all the time," said Luis Reyes, NRC executive director for operations. "We are there where the rubber meets the road when it comes to inspections."
The report also criticized the agency for "not following up to verify that all violations of security requirements have been corrected" and for not filing official reports on all such incidents.
At least two NRC inspectors are assigned to each of the 65 commercial nuclear power plant sites in 31 states. Reyes acknowledged they have broad responsibilities and do not file written reports on all security shortcomings, only "the more significant ones." Those viewed as of "low level" importance are evaluated on a sample basis, he said. "It's a matter of resources."
In separate testimony, nuclear industry representatives said utilities have spent more than $1 billion on security improvements and increased security forces by 60 percent, hiring 3,000 additional officers, since Sept. 11, 2001.
"Nuclear power plants are the most secure commercially owned facilities in the country," said Marvin Fertel, senior vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry trade group.
Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., chairman of the subcommittee, said there still "is no reasonable assurance plants are adequately protected."
Source: http://newsobserver.com/news/story/1637549p-7858576c.html
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