FAA equipment failure snarls air traffic

LOS ANGELES – Los Angeles’ major airports came to a near stop for more than three hours Tuesday after radio and radar equipment failed at a key air traffic control center in the Mojave Desert, forcing the diversion of as many as 800 commercial airline flights bound for Southern California and halting all takeoffs from the region’s major airports.

The outage was repaired about 8 p.m. — nearly three and a half hours after it began — and all airports resumed regular operations, said Cyndy Johnson, spokeswoman for the Oakland International Airport, where about two dozen flights were delayed.

The diverted flights landed at other airports in Northern California and in other states, officials said, creating a massive air traffic snarl. Planes scheduled to take off for Southern California were being held on the ground at airports throughout the nation.

The cause of the equipment failure at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale was not immediately determined, but the Federal Aviation Administration said it could be some sort of “computer glitch.”

The control center handles cruise-altitude air traffic across Southern California and most of Arizona and Nevada. The equipment failure cut off all radio communications between planes and the center, and at the same time, the planes disappeared from the center’s radar screens.

The FAA stressed that the loss of radar and radios did not pose a serious safety hazard. Many of the planes still appeared on radar systems at other control facilities. Pilots, following established procedures, switched radio frequencies and began talking to controllers at other facilities.

“When you have a failure of this magnitude, you are bound to have a chaotic situation because you have no ability to talk to aircraft under your control that are your responsibility,” said Hamid Ghaffari, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Most puzzling, Ghaffari said, was that the backup system also failed.

“It’s an absolute failure of the system,” he said. “Some questions really need to be answered by the FAA about how we are going to avoid this from reoccurring.”

The day proved arduous for passengers traveling to and from the Los Angeles region Tuesday afternoon. In the waiting room of Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport, a cacophony of cell phone chatter echoed as travelers tried to rearrange plans.

Vienna Murray, of Oakland, spent an hour on a Southwest Airlines jet on the tarmac at Burbank before being released back into the airport.

“I’m going to call my husband for the fifth time and tell him don’t be there at 7 p.m. to pick me up,” she said.

The insurance education manager, who was trying to get home, said she was disappointed because she just missed the flight at 4:45 p.m. that would have whisked her to Oakland before all of Southern California air travel was shut down.