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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 ...
Practicing for martial law and CWII.
Yes - it made me look for the use of heavy duty RADAR or jamming. Instead, the unit just beat itself to death - "Toast" probably applies....
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Sounds like U2K to me.
As I recall, there was one time that an EA-6B prowler switched on it's ECM systems off the East Coast, and shut pretty much shut down ATC radar all up and down the east coast.
Mark
Thanks to Y2K testing, we learned that a certain municipal fueling station (for police & fire vehicles) would have failed on 1/1/2000, and we contacted the manufacturer of the pumps and auditing systems for an update.
In the simulation, the pumps simply stopped working.
Mark
Military air traffic out of Nellis AFB passes thu this air traffic control system every day and has done so for many many years. U-2’s, SR-71’s, RF-4C’s etc. if this were a real fault it would be happening all the time and have been corrected.
So either they had a component failure or this was human error.
Thank you for telling us the real story. What a misleading headline.
I didn't buy TP again until last year.
I call BS. I have a wife, and judging by the rate in which she goes through toilet paper, then multiplying by four for the presence of at least four women in your household, you'd have to had to had bought at minimum 2 truckloads of TP in order for it to last 13 years.
The math doesn't lie.
The number was likely stored as an “unsigned integer” in 2 bytes, meaning the max value would be 64535 ... plenty for practically all air traffic, but “rolling over” (subtracting 64536 until it fits) for anything over that. This was long the norm in programming. So...a U2 comes by at 85000 ft, registers as 20000 ft, and lots of traffic around that level goes into a panic.
LAX needs a shorter leash.
I’ve been on passenger jets where the captain has announce that we will be cruising at 34,000. So a computer that couldn’t handle altitudes over 32,768 couldn’t handle routine flight operations.
“Fried the computers???”
I find it unlikely any hardware was fried, but I can see that if the software went into a “loop”, and tried repeatedly query the contact, and run any de-conflict, or collision avoidance issue looking at it in a “2D” environment, it does seem like our ATC system is again starting to fail us...
It is already, probably, going to have deadly results before anything is really done about this...
You are quite welcome, Sir.
As an aviation professional, it often seems the media is only interested in sensationalism, not the often boring facts.
But I'm sure other professions suffer the same treatment.
You guys didn't notice the problem because thousands of programmers like me took care of it, thank you very much. I was part of the generation that created the "problem" in the first place (out of necessity) and we were also the ones to solve it. So yes, there was a Y2K problem, just like there were WMDs in Iraq.
When you read about aviation in the media and you see the gross incaccuraccies it confirms your suspicions about the rest of the reporting.
I got divorced a year later, so it was just for a single guy. Your argument is invalid.
It lasted a decade.
/johnny
Must have been aliens....
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