Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Wouldn't You Prefer A Nice Game Of Chess?

The FAA computers have sprung a bit of a leak. It's a small one, just the kind of thing that paralyzes every major airport in the country for an afternoon.
Every major airport in the United States was experiencing flight delays Tuesday afternoon because of a communications breakdown at a Federal Aviation Administration facility, the administration said.

The facility south of Atlanta was having problems processing data, requiring that all flight-plan information be processed through a facility in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The two facilities process all flight plans for commercial and general aviation flights in the United States, said FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen.

The administration said there are no radar outages and said they have not lost contact with any planes. The planes currently in the air have flight plans and should arrive safely at their destinations, said CNN aviation expert Miles O'Brien.

"This is really not a safety issue, this is an aggravation issue," O'Brien said.

Airline passengers may have more delays ahead of them.

"This has potential as time goes on to turn into a much bigger mess," O'Brien said.
But hey, all those FAA budget cuts were needed, not to mention dumping all those billions into making sure we're not bringing plastic bottles onto airplanes.

Or you know, maybe this happened on purpose, but nobody's going to confirm anything like that.

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