Heard last night on radio news that Palmdale air traffic control went down for many hours anyone know the details,is it due to new rushed into production y2k ready maybe not software

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Last night I was listening to the radio when on the news I heard that the palmdale Air traffic control went down for many hours and they had to direct the planes in manual mode using radios. Does anyone have more details on this. Could it be related to the new software being rushed into service. Seems like its making flying dangerous these days. Pilots you need to investigate this matter diligently, the life you save may be your own.

-- y2k aware mike (y2k aware mike @ conservation . com), August 20, 1999

Answers

Well, isn't that the only possible explanation? Any other reason would just be happy-face spin.

-- cd (artful@dodger.com), August 20, 1999.

This is more serious than it sounds at first. Palmdale air traffic control isn't just something for the two small airports at Palmdale, CA (Palmdale and Fox Field).

"Palmdale air traffic control" is another way to say "LA Center". Which is the FAA Regional air traffic control center for much of the California, Arizona and Nevada, plus the traffic to/from Mexico and along the coast.

If the center went down due to a failure, I'm sure we'll get it on this evening's news. Also it may have been an outage due to installing new equipment. Or it could have been another one of those annoying computer ("But it wasn't a Y2K fix!") glitches which seem to be coming in a big crop this year.

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), August 20, 1999.


Mike, it was the new software "HOST" which I believe also caused problems in O'Hare a while back. The local paper has an article. Here is the URL but I am link-impaired. Hopefully this is the correct one . . .

http://www.sacbee.com/news/calreport/calrep_story.cgi?N467.HTML

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Malfunctioning air traffic computer delays nearly 140 flights

PALMDALE, Calif. (AP) -- Nearly 140 airline flights at five airports in the Southwest were delayed up to 90 minutes because the region's new host air traffic control computer failed, the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday.

The computer at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale guides flights north of the U.S.-Mexico border, over Central California, Nevada and the Pacific Ocean. It failed at 5:07 a.m. Thursday and was fully restored at 8:05 a.m.

"It was the main computer that processes flight information. They could still see the blips but the screen didn't show what the aircraft were," FAA spokesman Mitch Barker said from Seattle.

The controllers relied on their memories to identify planes on their screen and they were guided to their destinations, Barker said. No airplanes were endangered, he said.

The failure delayed two aircraft at Burbank Airport for 16 minutes, 24 aircraft at Las Vegas for 52 to 81 minutes, 13 aircraft at Orange County for 53 to 51 minutes, 57 aircraft at San Diego for 50 to 90 minutes and 41 aircraft at Los Angeles for 30 to 45 minutes, Barker said.

An unrelated power failure early Thursday at San Francisco International Airport also delayed flights there.

The cause of the computer failure hadn't been determined, Barker said.

Until the problem was fixed, the FAA imposed what it calls a "ground stop" -- halting planes from taking off and entering airspace controlled by the Palmdale center. The FAA later allowed airports to let flights take off after getting permission individually from the Palmdale center.

The Palmdale center was the fifth in the U.S. to begin using the new computer system, called Host and Oceanic Computer System Replacement, installed last year as part of a nationwide $425 million FAA modernization.

The system began controlling Southern California traffic in March, after workers fixed a software bug that made the computer freeze periodically.

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Here we go again!

-- Margaret (janssm@aol.com), August 20, 1999.


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