Posted at 11:42 a.m. PDT Monday, October 23, 2000

Software fault causes major delays at airports BY BAY CITY NEWS SERVICE

The FAA reported this morning that a national ground stoppage imposed as a result of computer problems at a Bay area air traffic control center has been lifted and flight delays are diminishing.

San Francisco International Airport experienced the worst delays with approximately 90 aircraft waiting an average of up to two hours to depart, according to spokesman Mike McCarron. He said all flights are expected to be back on schedule by mid-afternoon.

San Jose International Airport delayed around 25 flights for 20 to 30 minutes this morning. Spokesman Steve Luckenbac said the airport was late this morning getting caught up and flights should be back on schedule by noon.

Oakland International Airport has been back on track since about 10 a.m. It experienced the least problems of the Bay area airports this morning with minor delays of 10 to 15 minutes. An airport spokesman said he did not know the number of flights affected, but Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Jerry Snyder said the number was around six.

Snyder said trouble began today when the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center in Fremont, which controls air space in Northern California and parts of Nevada, took its computer off-line and out of service between midnight and 5 a.m. for some general maintenance.

Snyder said that when technicians attempted to put the computers back on-line at 5 a.m., the computers did not respond to the new FAA software upgrade.

The problem prevented the control center's computers from taking, digitizing and creating Alphanumeric messages of data that are exchanged between the center and airport towers, Snyder said. The missing information included flight numbers, altitude and other small bits of information that accompany radar blips, which then had to be either typed in manually at the terminal or verbally exchanged over the phone.

Snyder stressed that air safety was not compromised at any time, and although amplifying blocks of information were missing, there was never a loss of radar images.

The FAA declared a local ground stoppage, followed by a national ground stoppage at 7:30 a.m., that caused hour-long flight delays throughout the country. Snyder said there was no way to estimate the number of flights delayed nationwide.

Snyder said the new FAA software was reinstalled on Oakland control center computers at 7:50 a.m., the system went back on-line and the national ban was lifted about an hour later.

Technicians are continuing to evaluate the situation and determine where the conflict occurred by assessing the system's hardware and software loading procedure, Snyder said.

Oakland control center computers received the FAA software upgrade a week ago and everything was running smoothly throughout the week, Snyder said. The center is also on the tail-end of the upgrade. Snyder said control centers across the country that use the new upgrade have not experienced any problems.

Snyder noted that the incident is similar to an outage at the Los Angeles control center last week. However, he said, Los Angeles' software difficulties related to missing lines in the logic path that were specific to Los Angeles. The FAA has yet to determine what caused the problem at the Oakland center.

http://www0.mercurycenter.com/breaking/docs/008372.htm

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), October 23, 2000

Answers

How far reaching are these new software installation problems? These have been going on since the middle of last week.

-- LillyLP (lillyLP@aol.com), October 23, 2000.

10/23 15:27 Flights Slowed in Western U.S. by Computer Glitch (Update1) By Rip Watson

Washington, Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Hundreds of U.S. airline flights to and from Northern California were grounded earlier today after the second failure of a Federal Aviation Administration computer in less than a week.

Today's problem at the FAA's center in Oakland halted all flights at the region's three largest airports, San Francisco International Airport, Oakland International Airport and San Jose International Airport for nearly three hours early Monday. Takeoffs and landings halted at 5 a.m. and resumed at 8 a.m. San Francisco time, FAA spokesman Jerry Snyder said.

The failure today in a system that processes information from radar wasn't related to an FAA computer failure in Los Angeles last Thursday that delayed flights by as much as four hours, Snyder said. The problem in Oakland today occurred when FAA technicians were unable to restart computer systems after performing maintenance overnight.

``By mid-afternoon (West Coast time) we should be back to normal,'' said Mike McCarron, a spokesman for San Francisco International Airport, where about 120 flights have been delayed today.

Delayed Flights

At the Oakland International Airport, 38 flights were delayed due to the computer problem, causing passengers to wait on average about 45 minutes, said spokeswoman Cyndy Johnson.

In addition, 16 flights were delayed at the San Jose International Airport, though the airport expects schedules to return to normal by the afternoon, said airport spokesman Rich Dressler.

Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Whitney Brewer said the Dallas- based carrier's flights were delayed up to two hours in the morning primarily at San Jose and San Francisco. Service returned to normal in the early afternoon, she said.

The FAA is ``now just working out the delays throughout the system,'' said Snyder. The San Francisco airport, which at 10 a.m. West Coast time was awaiting clearance for 86 flights to takeoff, was still experiencing up to two-hour delays nearly three hours later, McCarron said.

Last week's delays were caused when a computer upgrade failed for the Los Angeles area network.

The same computer upgrade was completed in Oakland last week. The FAA doesn't yet know what caused today's failure, Snyder said. A similar computer failure occurred in Oakland in August.

The delays also affected airports in Sacramento, California, and Reno, Nevada.

http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?ptitle=Top%20World% 20News&s1=blk&tp=ad_topright_topworld&T=markets_bfgcgi_content99.ht&s2 =blk&bt=ad_position1_windex&middle=ad_frame2_windex&s=AOfSRBxRsRmxpZ2h 0

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 23, 2000.