September 6, 2008 (by Otto Smyth)
According to reports by aircraft accident lawyers, a computer software problem shut down the Federal Aviation Administration last week. This is the primary system that is used for processing flight plans, causing delayed flights in the Eastern United States. The flights were delayed as long as two hours in some cases.
This malfunction in the software occurred at approximately 1:25 p.m. at Heatsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. This is airport being the busiest hub saw the most delays of two hours that lasted into the evening hours. Other airports that were affected were ones from Chicago to New York.
Some of the airports that were affected were Logan International Airport in Boston, O’Hare in Chicago as well as Midway, Liberty International Airport in Newark. At Liberty, flights were delays as long as an hour and fifteen minutes.
Approximately twenty-four hours after the malfunction in the software the FAA Air Traffic Organization reported that things were slowly returning to normal. They also believe that the problem had affected hundreds of flights and that could be a conservative estimate. They are also investigating the problem to get a clearer picture of what occurred.
The Hampton Georgia is where the problem began and because this was the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, two things occurred. The first is that it immediately stopped air traffic, because planes can not take off with without flight plan approval, with the system down this was not possible. The second thing that occurred was for the operation to be sent to a different site and in this case it is the back up processing center located in Salt Lake City.
Once everything had been redirected to Salt Lake City the center there began to fail because of the volume of flight plans requested. They began to turn them down due to the amount of requests and this stopped flights in the east, many of these flights put in a second request and this helped to delay flights even further, according to Hank Krakowski the chief operating officer of the FAA Air Traffic Organization.
Krakowski stated that software engineers had identified the problem that occurred and the engineers were reloading the program.
This is not unlike the malfunction that occurred in June 2007, that also delayed hundreds of planes and flights that ended up canceled, although Karkowski stated that it was not the same malfunction. He went on to say they would need to do an in-depth study into the malfunction because this is something they have never seen.
He did assure it did not occur from hacking and that it appears to be an internal software processing failure. If you were injured in an aircraft accident, contact California personal injury lawyers now at 888-400-9721.
news
personal injury attorney los angeles.