CALIFORNIA Radio, radar failures prompt diverted flights

The breakdown left thousands of passengers stranded.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LOS ANGELES -- As many as 800 commercial airline flights bound for Southern California were diverted and all takeoffs from the region's major airports were halted after radio and radar equipment failed for 3 1/2 hours at a major air traffic control center in the Mojave Desert Tuesday.
The diverted flights landed at other airports in northern California and in other states, officials said, creating a massive air traffic snarl that was expected to last into today. Planes scheduled to take off for Southern California were being held on the ground at airports throughout the nation.
A computer glitch at 4:40 p.m. apparently caused the radio and radar failures at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, which handles cruise-altitude air traffic across Southern California and most of Arizona and Nevada, an area of about 178,000 square miles.
Without warning, radios went dead and radar screens went blank. An official with the air traffic controllers union, Hamid Ghaffari, said a seldom-used backup system "come up for a couple of minutes, and then it failed, too."
Exactly what went wrong was not immediately determined. Throughout Southern California, neighborhoods in flight paths soon experienced unusual silence.
Thousands stranded
About 8:15 p.m., the radar and radios went back in service. But the FAA said it would be hours before all the delayed and diverted flights were back in the air and air traffic was back to normal.
The system breakdown left thousands of passengers stranded, some circling in planes for an hour or more before landing at airports they hadn't expected, others waiting on the ground for planes that didn't take off as scheduled.
Scores of passengers at Los Angeles International Airport's Terminal One emitted a concerted groan when someone announced over a loudspeaker that all flights in and out of the airport had been canceled for the night.
The FAA said the system failure never posed a serious safety hazard. Many of the planes still appeared on radar systems at other control facilities, and pilots, following established procedures, switched radio frequencies and began talking to controllers at other facilities.
But Ghaffari, president of the controllers union chapter at the regional center, said the failures complicated the job of air traffic control exponentially.
"When you have a failure of this magnitude, you are bound to have a chaotic situation, because you have no ability to talk to aircraft under your control," Ghaffari said.