FL - FAA Links Power Loss to Switch

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Published Tuesday, August 1, 2000, in the Miami Herald

FAA links power loss to switch

BY DANIEL de VISE ddevise@herald.com

The control tower at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport lost power for two crucial hours Saturday because of a freak mishap that foiled a backup system designed to prevent such interruptions, a Federal Aviation Administration official said Monday.

FAA investigators blame the outage on a switch that is supposed to transfer the control tower's power needs to the backup generator, according to FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen. When the switch itself failed, neither power source was available.

``We don't know why it failed,'' Bergen said. ``We also don't know what caused the system to want to switch to the engine generator. We understand that the weather was relatively good that day.''

Bergen said the total loss of power in an airport control tower is ``very, very rare'' in the federal agency's eight-state Southeast region -- so uncommon, in fact, that the FAA doesn't keep statistical records of such mishaps. Airport spokespeople in Fort Lauderdale and Miami said they couldn't recall a similar event in the recent past.

``I can't remember anything in the last six or seven years that was like this,'' said Jim Reynolds, Fort Lauderdale airport spokesman.

Saturday's outage caused one-hour delays for departing aircraft, Reynolds said. Air traffic controllers lost their regular radio contact with incoming planes and had to rely on hand-held radios. They operated without a visual radar image of air traffic and used cellular phones to get verbal radar reports from Miami International Airport.

Incoming pilots could rely on the airport's runway lights, which continued to function, and on their own collision avoidance systems, a localized radar device that reports any nearby aircraft.

Airport control towers seldom lose power because they are fitted with backup generators that switch on when commercial power goes off, Bergen said. Air traffic controllers can flip the switch manually; it operates automatically in an outage.

FAA investigators are trying to learn what prompted the switch to activate Saturday and why it failed. They found burned wiring around the failed switch.

Commercial power was restored to the airport by 7 p.m. Saturday. Airport officials have brought in a temporary generator to substitute for the regular generator until the switch is fixed.

``Our focus now is on repairing the switch and getting the engine generator back on line,'' Bergen said.

The control towers at major U.S. airports are the responsibility solely of the FAA and are staffed with FAA employees. The most frequent mishaps, airport spokespeople said, involve loss of radar service. Miami's airport suffered a string of radar outages in 1995; in such cases, an airport can rely on the radar system of a neighboring airport.

With clear skies, air traffic controllers need little more than a pair of binoculars to track incoming planes, Reynolds said. Controllers at the Fort Lauderdale airport Saturday were helped by good visibility.

``If you were up in the tower that night, I think it would have been very calm,'' Reynolds said.

http://www.miamiherald.com/content/today/news/broward/digdocs/085152.htm

-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), August 01, 2000


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