Air traffic failure may be a design flaw in upgrade

Ron Carpenter and his fellow air traffic controllers were busy keeping more than 200 airplanes on course over seven states when their communication system crashed. Suddenly they couldn’t talk to pilots or call for help.\n“Somebody just pulled out a cell phone,” Carpenter said. “Then everybody else says, ‘Hey, that’s not a bad idea.’”\nSo at a major Federal Aviation Administration center, controllers were reduced to using their personal cell phones to ask other centers to help keep planes on course and avert disaster.\nThey succeeded, but now members of Congress want to know if the Memphis failure last month was an isolated breakdown or evidence of a design flaw in a $2.4 billion project to upgrade telecommunications at air-control centers and other FAA installations across the country.\nThe FAA blames the disruption on the failure of a major AT&T phone line, but critics say that the trouble is deeper – that the new communications network being installed lacks sufficient backups.\n“It’s engineered this way, and it’s going to happen again,” said Dave Spero, a vice president of the union representing FAA technicians.\nDuring the breakdown, 100,000 square miles of airspace were closed off for more than three hours and flights around the country were canceled, delayed or diverted, adding to the woes of a flying public already fed up with disruptions.\nThe upgrade is called the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure project, or FTI. The prime contractor on the 15-year project is Florida-based Harris Corp., which said in September that nearly 90 percent of the FAA’s entire system of more than 4,000 installations had been switched over.\nThe FAA told a congressional subcommittee that the Memphis outage was an AT&T problem and that an investigation was under way.\nFAA spokesman Paul Takemoto said the network has backup phone lines for emergencies and each center is served by more than one communications carrier.\n“The failure was in a network we don’t own or operate,” Takemoto said. “It was a massive failure, according to what BellSouth has told us, that has never been experienced before and affected all of the customers in that region, not just the FAA.”\nAT&T refused to talk about the breakdown except to say its cause was under investigation. Harris, which landed the contract in 2002, also had no comment.\nWhen communications failed, controllers at other centers – summoned by cell phone – directed planes out of the Memphis airspace, which covers parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee.\nAll airline traffic within a 250-mile radius of Memphis was shut down and flights heading into the region were rerouted. Flight disruptions were reported in Nashville, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Miami and other cities.\nThe FAA is under pressure from Congress and President Bush to reduce flight delays. In the first seven months of 2007, the industry turned in its worst on-time performance since the government began collecting comparable data in 1995.