1 bad file, 1 bad day of delays at airport

The Federal Aviation Administration said new computer equipment should be in place by early next year to help mitigate flight delays such as the ones caused Tuesday by a software glitch at the agency’s facility near Hampton, just south of Atlanta.

A “corrupted data file” at the Hampton facility that processes electronic flight plans caused about 650 flights to be delayed nationwide, out of about 300,000 flights the FAA oversees in a 24-hour period.

Steve Zaidman, the FAA’s Washington-based vice president for technical operations, said Tuesday’s problems began during a routine daily software download. The Hampton site’s computers, which oversee flight plans on the East Coast, discovered a file they could not read, he said.

Those computers immediately transferred flight-plan information to the FAA’s computers in Salt Lake City, which control Western flight operations. The transfer temporarily overwhelmed that facility and led to flight delays, primarily in Atlanta and Chicago.

“There is a hardware replacement program that will mitigate future problems,” Zaidman said during a Wednesday interview. “Nothing, however, is 100 percent fail-safe.”

The more sophisticated computers to be installed at the Hampton facility by early 2009 should be better able to process files like the one that led to Tuesday’s problems, Zaidman said. He said officials are still investigating the precise cause of the corrupted file.

Tuesday’s troubles did not create any safety problems and had no impact on the FAA’s ability to track flights, spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said.

The FAA facility where Tuesday’s glitch occurred is a small, brick building that is a part of the FAA’s gated Hampton Center, which controls high-altitude flights along much of the East Coast. The separate facility is part of the agency’s National Airspace Data Interchange Network, and it is referred to as the NADIN facility.

About 20 staffers and 15 support personnel run the NADIN operation.

“It’s a small bank of computers with telephone lines out the back,” Zaidman said. “You could put this equipment in a small closet.”

There have been two other disruptions at the NADIN facility over the past 12 months. One, last week, delayed about 130 flights, and one seven months ago affected flights in the New York area.

Zaidman said the glitches are not related and are not connected to any type of hacking or cyberterrorism. The two earlier glitches, he said, were related to hardware problems.

The Tuesday glitch, which generated instant headlines on cable news shows and across the Internet, turned out to be much ado about a relatively small number of delays. About three-quarters of Tuesday’s flight delays were caused by bad weather, not the computer glitch, the FAA said.

About 170 flights were delayed for an average of 75 minutes at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which handles about 2,700 flight operations a day. About 295 flights were delayed for 45 minutes at Chicago’s O’Hare, and about 75 flights were delayed for 45 minutes at Chicago’s Midway.

“We’re concerned anytime there are delays,” FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said, “but this was not as serious as the bad summer days when we have weather delays.”