This may not be Y2K, but it may be caused by the up grade to avoid Y2K problems. The fix becomes a bigger mess than the original problem.

JANUARY 06, 18:19 EST

FAA Computer Glitch Grounds Flights

Planes wait to take off AP/Kamenko Pajic [20K] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WASHINGTON (AP)  Computer problems grounded airplanes Thursday for a second time this week, frustrating passengers trying to fly in and out of nearly a dozen cities across the eastern third of the nation, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

Hundreds of flights were delayed when a computer at an FAA air traffic control center in Leesburg, Va., experienced problems transferring data about 6:45 a.m. EST. The computer processes information from radar systems, air traffic control centers around the East Coast and flight plans filed by airlines and individual pilots.

``Obviously people were inconvenienced, but they were not in danger,'' said William Shumann, a spokesman at FAA's headquarters in Washington. ``The backup system is safe, but it's a much slower system with less capacity and so we have to hold airplanes on the ground.''

Normal operations resumed at 9:49 a.m., but the delays left passengers sitting  up to two hours or more  aboard planes lined up on runways or waiting at gates for flights postponed or canceled.

Among the passengers grounded at Washington Reagan National Airport was Rep. Edward Pease, R-Ind., a member of the House Transportation Committee's aviation panel. He was trying to fly to Indianapolis to deliver a speech, but his plane never took off.

``I think we had been on the plane for 1 1/2 hours. The flight was canceled,'' Pease said. ``When we finally turned around and went back to the gate, there were planes everywhere.''

Pease said the delay underscores the need for Congress to give the FAA money to further modernize the air traffic control system, which is currently undergoing a $13 billion system upgrade. ``There is clearly a need to upgrade equipment at the FAA and we've known about it for years.''

David Fuscus, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association of America, the airlines' trade group, used the outage to call for steady funding from Congress. ``The problem is the system can't handle the traffic,'' he said. ``The system needs to meet the demand of the American people.''

FAA spokesman Eliot Brenner said the problem was not with new computer hardware installed as part of the administration's modernization effort, but with flight plan software that overloaded the computer system. ``It slowed it down to a point that it had to be taken off line,'' Brenner said. ``It took a second restart to clear the problems.''

Thursday's delays were experienced by passengers traveling to or from Reagan National, Dulles International and Baltimore-Washington International; John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark, N.J. in greater New York; and Teterboro, N.J., Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Raleigh-Durham, N.C., the FAA said.

Steve Letzler of Baldwin, N.Y., said in a telephone interview that his wife called him by cell phone while sitting for two hours in a plane stuck on the tarmac at LaGuardia.

``They were just sitting there. Everyone was antsy, apparently,'' Letzler said. ``She was a little upset. She just wanted to know if I had heard anything. The pilot said that apparently there was some sort of radar problem.''

Other flights affected were those routed through the airspace controlled by the FAA center in Leesburg, which covers southern New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, Virginia, eastern West Virginia and eastern North Carolina.

``There may have been some flights from Chicago to the Washington area that were also delayed, but no West Coast flights were delayed,'' Shumann said.

On Monday night, a computer malfunction at the FAA's center in Nashua, N.H., delayed flights at airports in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. FAA officials said a backup computer system was used when the main computer at the air traffic control center experienced problems for about three hours.

Shumann said the problems in Leesburg and Nashua do not point to a systemic problem at air traffic center computers nationwide.

``Weather and traffic volume account for 90 percent of all traffic delays,'' he said. ``Air traffic control outages such as what happened here account for just under 2 percent of all air traffic delays.''

Kevin Lamberth, president of a local chapter of Professional Airways Systems Specialists, which represents FAA employees who maintain air traffic control equipment, said the computer problem at Leesburg involved a system that stores flight plans.

``This was just a glitch, but we're concerned about all our equipment,'' Lamberth said. ``Most of our technicians spend a lot of time putting out fires. If we had the proper staffing, we could do more preventative maintenance. Now we have to fix things as they break.''

-- New Guy (Newbie@begentle.com), January 06, 2000