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For the second time in a little more than a year, a glitch at one of the two centers that handle flight plans for the nation's air travel system set off delays and cancellations for passengers around the country.
The snarl Thursday -- traced to something as simple as a single circuit board -- prompted calls for more money and manpower at the Federal Aviation Administration, which has struggled without success for years to overhaul the air traffic system.
The circuit board, at an FAA center in Salt Lake City, is part of a multibillion-dollar nationwide communications network that the agency has spent years installing as part of plans to modernize air traffic control.
Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed from Atlanta to Houston to Phoenix after the problem began about 5 a.m. The glitch was fixed about four hours later, but scattered delays were reported throughout the day. Planes in the air were never in danger.
Salt Lake City International Airport operations spokeswoman Barbara Gann said there were some delays in the afternoon but it was unclear if they were related to the glitch. She said the airport experienced a "normal operating day."
Delta Airlines, which operates a major hub at Salt Lake International, reported "significant" delays in its traffic early Thursday.
While the delays were not as bad as those caused by a major winter storm, passengers -- already frustrated by add-on fees for checking bags and the
"I am sitting here at the airport for an additional three hours when I could have been sleeping in," said Angelo Adams of Atlanta, waiting for a flight to Philadelphia.
Lawmakers in Washington pounced. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said the country's aviation system is "in shambles" and the FAA needs more resources to prevent similar problems in the future.
"If we don't deliver the resources, manpower and technology (to) the FAA it needs to upgrade the system, these technical glitches that cause cascading delays and chaos across the country are going to become a very regular occurrence," he said in a statement.
It was just a year and three months ago that the FAA had to deal with a similar headache. In August 2008, a software malfunction delayed hundreds of flights around the country.
FAA officials and an official for the union that represents the agency's technicians said Thursday's failure prevented air traffic control computers in different regions of the country from sending each other information about flights going back and forth.
The two large computer centers -- in Salt Lake City and Hampton, an Atlanta suburb -- were both affected, as were 21 regional radar centers around the country.
The problem began with the failure of a single small circuit board inside a router.
Air traffic controllers were forced to type in complicated flight plans themselves because they could not be transferred automatically from computers in one region of the country to computers in another, slowing down the whole system.
The equipment that failed was part of a telecommunication network owned and operated by FAA contractor Harris Corp. of Melbourne, Fla.
The union that represents the computer technicians that work for FAA said the network is maintained by Harris, which didn't have its own technician on site when the equipment failed.
Tom Brantley, national president of Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, said Harris initially tried to troubleshoot the problem long distance without sending a technician to the FAA center in Salt Lake. When that didn't work, a technician was dispatched, Brantley said in a statement, but the delay extended the outage.
