If you are trying to fly out of a Northeast U.S. airport today, chances are you are still on the ground waiting for your flight. Airports throughout the country -- and the Northeast in particular -- are seeing severe disruptions due to an unholy combination of bad weather and a major problem with certain ATC systems.
The ATC outage occurred at about 5a.m. EST, and all systems were back up by 10a.m. While FAA does not yet know the root cause of the problem, it resulted in both of FAA’s centralized flight plan processing systems going offline. Surveillance and communications were unaffected.
Delay and cancellation totals are not known yet, although the ripple effect will continue throughout the day. Because of the weather problems on the East Coast (rain and low ceilings), it will be difficult to ascertain which delays were caused by the equipment failure. There were 909 delays reported systemwide on Wednesday, but I would guess the Thursday total will be close to three times as large. Cancellations will likely run into triple digits.
By 11:19 a.m EST, there were gate hold and taxi delays of up to 2.5 hours at Washington Dulles; 1 hour 15 minutes at Washington National; and 1 hour 44 minutes at Newark. There were delays of between 30 minutes and 45 minutes at Atlanta, Philadelphia, LaGuardia, and Chicago O’Hare. There were also ground delay programs in effect for inbound traffic at Philadelphia, Newark and LaGuardia.
The loss of the two national airspace data interchange network (NADIN) centers in Atlanta and Salt Lake City meant controllers had to enter flight plan information manually. Major NADIN outages have occurred at least twice in the past two years. Traffic management initiatives that are usually automated were also affected, meaning the airport ground stops had to be coordinated manually.
According to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, weather information systems were not functioning, and NOTAM alerts were not being processed. “Controllers are without electronic decision-making tools and cannot keep up with the sheer numbers of flights – resulting in delays,” NATCA said.
