Log In | Register
SAN FRANCISCO — Air traffic controllers in a major control center in California were reduced to using personal mobile phones to guide dozens of airplanes when the communications system crashed for several minutes Wednesday morning.
Controller Scott Conde said he was in front of a radar screen at the so-called Oakland Center in Fremont when half the facility lost landline and radio communications, which prevented him from talking directly to planes he was guiding to Fresno and Visalia.
Conde said he was reduced to relaying instructions from his mobile telephone to controllers stationed elsewhere, who in turn got in contact with Conde's airplanes.
"It was tense and everybody was working," Conde said. "It got really professional really fast."
Conde is also the air traffic controllers' top union official at the center, which he said is responsible for guiding airplanes over 18.9 million square miles before handing them off to other controllers for landing approaches in the region.
Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said the outage occurred between 8:12 a.m. and 8:27 a.m. and said no flights were in danger, though five flights were delayed.
Gregor said that mobile phone usage is part of the FAA's contingency plans for such communication failures.
"No aircraft got too close together as a result of this incident," Gregor said. "As soon as the outage occurred, we implemented measures to stop any additional aircraft from entering Oakland Center's airspace."
Gregor said a contractor he didn't identify appears to be to blame for the outage.
"We're building even more redundancy into the system to prevent another similar event from occurring again," he said.
A longer, more disruptive failure of the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure occurred in 2007, prompting a congressional inquiry into the system. During the breakdown in Memphis, 100,000 square miles of airspace were closed off for more than three hours and flights around the country were canceled, delayed or diverted.
