A second air traffic control facility in the United States experienced a 90-second communications outage this week after a series of disruptions raised safety fears and caused long flight delays at Newark Liberty International Airport near New York.
Part of an air traffic control facility in Colorado that coordinates flights over a large swath of the West had a partial outage on Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday. The outage occurred after another air traffic facility in Philadelphia had two radar outages in recent weeks that left controllers unable to communicate with planes headed to or from Newark Liberty International Airport, a major international hub near New York.
The Colorado outage occurred around 1:50 p.m. when a pair of transmitters that cover a portion of the airspace went down. Unlike the Newark outage, the controllers in Colorado lost touch only with some pilots and were able to re-establish communications.
“Controllers used another frequency to relay instructions to pilots,” the aviation agency said. “Aircraft remained safely separated and there were no impacts to operations. The F.A.A. is investigating.”
The two air traffic facilities serve different functions. The Philadelphia facility mainly guides planes landing at or taking off from Newark while the facility in Colorado oversees planes during their journeys. The aircraft are typically higher in the sky, spaced farther apart and moving at steady speeds. There are about two dozen such facilities nationwide, each covering more than 100,000 square miles of airspace.
The outage was reported earlier by the ABC affiliate Denver7. Citing unnamed sources, the station reported that almost two dozen pilots headed to Denver International Airport were unable to contact air traffic control for six minutes on Monday afternoon.
According to FlightAware, a flight tracking service, the Denver airport, the biggest in Colorado, had a relatively uneventful day on Monday. Just two flights were canceled and fewer than 300 had been delayed. United Airlines is the largest airline at the airport, commanding about 38 percent of flights there. Southwest Airlines is the next largest, with a 32 percent share, according to federal data.
United and Southwest said the outage did not disrupt operations.
Federal officials said this week that the Newark outages occurred when a telecommunications line failed and a backup line was overwhelmed by the data it needed to transmit. The F.A.A. is working with its telecommunications providers to install a third fiber-optic line at the Philadelphia facility and make other upgrades.
In a Senate hearing on Wednesday, an F.A.A. official played down the consequences of those outages.
“I don’t believe there was a heightened significant danger to the flying public,” said Franklin McIntosh, the deputy chief operating officer of the agency and a former air traffic controller.
Newark has also been disrupted by construction on one of its three runways, which is expected to end next month before resuming again on weekends later in the year, and its air traffic controller crew is understaffed. To minimize flight delays and cancellations, the agency is meeting with airlines this week to discuss limiting flights at the airport through most of the rest of the year.
Niraj Chokshi writes about aviation, rail and other transportation industries.
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