Thursday November 19, 06:00 PM
UPDATE 3-System glitch causing US flight delays is fixed
By Karen Jacobs and John Crawley
ATLANTA/WASHINGTON, Nov 19 (Reuters) - A problem with a flight-processing system disrupted U.S. air travel for several hours on Thursday but was later fixed, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The FAA said it was investigating the cause of the problem, which hit the U.S. East Coast hardest and caused cancellations and delays.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association said the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, the computerized system that processes flight plans, failed in both Atlanta and Salt Lake City, Utah.
'We do not yet know the technical reason for the failure,' the association said in a statement.
The FAA reported arrival delays of more than an hour in Washington and New York-area airports, including LaGuardia and New Jersey's Newark. Delays at Philadelphia topped two hours.
All major airlines service the region. US Airways has major operations in Philadelphia, New York and Washington. Continental Airlines Inc has a hub at Newark, and Delta Air Lines main hub is in Atlanta.
Airlines expected operations to return to normal during the afternoon.
'It will take a while to recover and to launch the backlog of flights that have been delayed on the ground at airports as a result of the system outage,' said Kathleen Bergen, a spokeswoman at the FAA's southern region.
The problem, which started at around 5 a.m. 1000 gmt, forced air controllers to input flight information manually, a time consuming process, but radars and radio worked at all times and there were no safety issues, the FAA added.
CANCELLATIONS AND DELAYS
At AirTran Airways, a unit of AirTran Holdings (NYSE: AAI - news) , 38 flights were canceled and dozens more were delayed nationwide in the first few hours of them problem, according to spokesman Christopher White.
Delta spokeswoman Susan Elliott said cancellations and delays were fairly minor by late morning local Atlanta time on Thursday, while AMR Corp (NYSE: AMR - news) 's American Airlines had flight delays that were as long as an hour, said spokesman Tim Smith.
Last year in August, hundreds of flights were delayed when a computer system that handles flight plan data broke down at an FAA facility in Georgia.
The FAA, Congress and airlines have wrangled for years over proposals to modernize the aging air traffic system, which is under strain from the tens of millions of commercial and private flights each year.
(Additional reporting by Philip Barbara and Tabassum Zakaria in Washington and Kyle Peterson in Chicago; Writing by Matthew Bigg, editing by David Storey) Keywords: AIRLINES DELAYS/
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