Air traffic glitch kicks off the holiday weekend

The busy Memorial Day weekend got off to a slow start for some travelers early Friday when a software glitch left controllers at a San Diego facility without maps showing terrain and airspace boundaries on their radarscopes, causing federal officials to shut down Southern California’s airspace for 48 minutes.

The outage, which caused about 100 flights to depart late, started at the Terminal Radar Approach Control Center around 2 a.m., controllers said, when they noticed that maps allowing them to track where aircraft are in the airspace disappeared from their monitors.

The giant San Diego air traffic control facility handles flights as they are coming in and out of airports in Southern California, from 3,000 to 15,000 feet.

The malfunction forced officials to hold Southland-bound flights on the ground from 5:34 a.m. to 6:22 a.m. at airports west of Denver International between the Canadian and Mexican borders, said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency operates the nation’s air traffic control network.

Among the 100 held flights were also 37 departing from Los Angeles International Airport, which were delayed an average of 24 minutes. It was unclear how many arriving flights were delayed.

“It was never a safety issue, because controllers could still see aircraft and talk to flight crews,” Gregor said.

But controllers disagreed, saying that at one point the outage forced one controller to handle several large swaths of airspace because radarscopes remained unworkable.

The malfunction also illustrated the fact that the FAA doesn’t have a contingency plan, the controllers added, for other facilities to handle the workload if the San Diego center goes down.

“There are no set procedures for us to assume” that facility’s airspace, said Hamid Ghaffari, a controllers union official at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, which handles flights at cruise altitudes.

The FAA’s Gregor said the agency does have a contingency plan and that, before officials shut down the airspace, controllers at the Palmdale center handled three flights that were in the air.

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