Posted on 05/03/2014 1:15:20 PM PDT by george76
On Wednesday at about 2 p.m., according to sources, a U-2 spy plane, the same type of aircraft that flew high-altitude spy missions over Russia 50 years ago, passed through the airspace monitored by the L.A. Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, Calif. The L.A. Center handles landings and departures at the region’s major airports, including Los Angeles International (LAX), San Diego and Las Vegas.
The computers at the L.A. Center are programmed to keep commercial airliners and other aircraft from colliding with each other. The U-2 was flying at 60,000 feet, but the computers were attempting to keep it from colliding with planes that were actually miles beneath it.
Though the exact technical causes are not known, the spy plane’s altitude and route apparently overloaded a computer system called ERAM, which generates display data for air-traffic controllers. Back-up computer systems also failed.
As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had to stop accepting flights into airspace managed by the L.A. Center, issuing a nationwide ground stop that lasted for about an hour and affected thousands of passengers.
...
There were also delays at the airports in Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario and Orange County and at other airports across the Southwestern U.S.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
I love stories like that.
I don't know. I was an air traffic controller for 20 years, and I never heard of anything like this.
I understand your thinking, but it seems to me that airliners routinely go to 35000 feet, so such a problem would have been uncovered a long time ago.
I don't think MARSA would apply. That would be more for such things, as B-52s launching only seconds apart.
“12:01:01 AM, Jan 21, 2000...”
Jan 21???
I guess Y2K really DID mess things up.
/johnny
Momma, don’t take my LAX away!
I think that this story LAX credibility.
I was thinking of that story when I read this, and was going to reply “has the SR71 never flown past there?”
Sounds like a real WOPR to me.
Same here.
LOL. Thank goodness I only controlled airplanes for 20 years. I couldn't take it any longer.
They aren't always 100% correct. ;)
/johnny
Roger that :-)
love It!
Hmmmmmmm ..??
Was this a test of a new weapon ..???????? A new weapon which will fry everything ..??
The U-2's altitude was 60,000+, also known as OTP/600, but the controller, in error, entered the assigned altitude as OTP. This prompted the processing of flight strips and route processing in every altitude stratum. Also ERAM (a newish system) for some reason also processed as an inbound to every airport along the filed route (a loooong way). ERAM detected it was making an error, couldn't figure out why, and simply gave up (crashed).
It did not cause any aircraft to get close to each other, but the computer failure did cause lengthy delays.
By the way, I had 35 years as enroute ATC.
Civil air traffic has been able to fly above 40,000 ft for decades.
And it was only about a month ago that Obama had the radar on the SE coast shut down.
Here’s the other end of the scale:
“How Slow Can An SR-71 Fly?”
http://www.pirep.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=35804
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