FAA system crashes -- Y2K preview?
computerworld.com
Close call in air caused by computer glitch?
By Kathleen Ohlson
Two airplanes bound for Europe nearly collided off the coast of New
York's Long Island Sunday night at about the same time a computer
outage occurred at an air traffic control center in Nashua, N.H.,
according to an official statement from the Federal Aviation
Administration.
The two aircraft -- a Delta 767 bound for Zurich and a British
Caledonian L-1011 headed for Manchester, England -- came
within 1.07 miles of one another, but "the incident has not been
directly attributed to the outage and is still under investigation," the
FAA statement said.
The near-miss occurred at the same time that the Boston Air Route
Traffic Control Center experienced an outage -- from 9:35 p.m. to
10:05 p.m., the FAA said. An interface problem surfaced in the
center's air traffic computer, which processes flight data information,
forcing a switch to an independent backup system within several
seconds, the agency said. Radar target information is updated every
12 seconds at remote radar sites, the FAA added.
During the outage, controllers' problems were compounded when
four computer keyboards used to oversee sectors locked. In addition,
the "snitch" machine, which alerts the watch commander when
planes are too close to one another, failed to work, said Michael
Blake, regional vice president of the New England region for the
National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA).
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