Sun, Aug 30, 2009
FAA Communications System Shuts Down, Oakland Center
Controllers 'Scrambled to Keep Planes Safe'
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association is alerting
the public to yet another complaint in which they allege the FAA
has failed to meet its safety obligations. While the long-running
war of words between NATCA and the FAA seems to be remain "heated",
the details they are disclosing do seem to merit serious
investigation.
NATCA's Claim: A subcontractor's mistake caused the FAA
Telecommunications Infrastructure (FTI) system to shut down
Wednesday morning for 20 harrowing minutes at one of the country's
largest regional air traffic control centers, leaving more than
half the controllers on duty without the ability to communicate
with airborne aircraft or use landline telephones to communicate
with other air traffic control facilities.
Controllers at Oakland Center were forced to contact surrounding
FAA facilities with their personal cell phones and coordinate
instructions to aircraft that were relayed by these facilities over
the emergency radio frequencies. Oakland Center is responsible for
a huge swath of airspace encompassing most of the northern half of
California and parts of western Nevada, in addition to many
millions of miles of airspace over the Pacific Ocean.
Some 48 hours after the communications outage, NATCA has put
forth the following questions:
- Why has the FAA put the maintenance work for this critical
communications system in the hands of a series of subcontractors,
instead of having FAA employees do the work?
- Why weren't air traffic controllers told on Tuesday of the
maintenance work and the fact that redundancy in the system was on
its very last thread, thereby making it imperative that the
facility be put on some type of alert status?
- What level of confidence should controllers have in the work of
these subcontractors that so directly impacts the safety of the
flying public?
The outage lasted from approximately 8 a.m. PDT to 8:30 a.m. PDT
Wednesday. No further outages have been reported since that
time.
The problem appears to have begun on Tuesday, when the
subcontractors performing maintenance on the telephone and
communication lines noticed a problem. The system was put on a
backup line, but there was no notification given to air traffic
controllers whatsoever that this was happening and no indication
provided that controllers should be on alert should the system shut
down.
Earlier Wednesday, during troubleshooting of the FTI lines,
redundancies built into the backup system went down, leaving only
half of the facility with radios and landline communications with
other facilities. In addition, the terminal radar approach control
facilities that interact with both Oakland Center and airport tower
controllers did not get the data they needed to keep traffic moving
efficiently.
Calls to the FAA, from ANN, about the matter have yet to be
returned.
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