WASHINGTON — Flights over much of the eastern United States were delayed Thursday by a pre-dawn failure in a fairly new communications system, which led to the shutdown of a computer that accepts flight plans from the airlines and feeds them to air traffic controllers.
It was the fourth major systemwide disruption attributed to the communications system, which the Federal Aviation Administration began putting into service earlier in this decade as a way to cut costs and assure reliability.
But when it failed, at about 5 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday, the airlines had to send flight plans by fax, and the controllers typed them into their computers, sort of a hunt-and-peck exercise that was so cumbersome that many planes were delayed more than an hour. But there was no risk to planes in flight, according to the F.A.A.
By mid-morning the system was working again, but the backlog caused widespread airport delays.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/us/politics/20air.html
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