FUNDS SOUGHT TO FIX ‘EMERGENCY’
Friday’s problem is the latest and most dramatic sign of strain on a US air traffic control system beset by aging technology, equipment and communications problems and a shortage of several thousand controllers.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Friday called for US$50 billion in funding to upgrade air traffic control systems, up from US$30 billion he had sought earlier. “This is an emergency,” he said.
Duffy said the trouble began at 3.36pm ET (8.36pm GMT), when air traffic control centres experienced instability in radar and communications systems.
“Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they started to give us inconsistencies in the data from those routers and because of that we shut the system down,” Duffy said, adding that air traffic personnel never completely lost radar or communications as they guided thousands of planes to landings.
Duffy said the immediate problem had been fixed and that flying was safe, but warned that a broader overhaul of the air traffic control system was needed to prevent similar failures.
Earlier on Friday, before the outage, the White House and Department of Transportation had urged Congress to approve US$30.1 billion to upgrade aged airports and air traffic control infrastructure.
“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said. “Give us the money to fix it.”
