Bill,
You are correct,let's see the pollyanna's deny this.
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).
Controllers were forced to go into a low-level "dark, dark" mode, whereby planes are manually
accepted and handed off by controllers, and hand-written notes containing flight information, such as
altitude and speed, are exchanged, Blake said.
The center wasn't aware that the snitch machine wasn't operating until the pilots informed the
controllers, Blake said. Both planes were flying at 33,000 feet when their on-board Traffic Collision
Avoidance System (TCAS) came on, forcing the pilots to take action to avoid one another, Blake
said. Controllers later had to look at raw data to see how close the two planes actually were, he
added.
The FAA didn't return calls by deadline.
Certain individuals during the outage failed to follow the usual procedures, but "without the data, it
was less than a normal situation," said William Johannes, Boston Center's local president of NATCA.
Delta Airlines Inc. said it will work with the FAA to investigate what happened Sunday night, said
Kip Smith, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based airline. When a crew deviates from its regular course
because of TCAS directive, it's standard procedure to investigate that situation, he said.
However, the real issue beyond just Sunday's incident, is the fact that these types of outages have
occurred 200 times at the Boston Center this year alone, Johannes charged.
"When airplanes get less than the normal separation, [the idea that] the FAA has to determine
whether to blame an individual or a computer is ludicrous to me," he said. "With this failure rate, they
have no right thinking a person is to blame," Johannes added.
Outages have been occurring with the same piece of equipment -- the computer display channel --
on a regular basis for the past several months, including a 10-minute outage that happened last
Friday, Blake said, although he didn't specify the number of times the problem has cropped up. The
number of technicians that work on this equipment has been cut back, and the center needs more
people to troubleshoot these problems, he said.
The FAA expects to have the new parts in place to replace this equipment between January and
February 2000, the agency said.
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