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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Just in the nick of time

Current Mood:
CC is listening to: Living the Northern Summer--Jim Chappell (Living the Northern Summer)

Our flight to L.A. yesterday was at 8:30am. When Steve called his mom yesterday afternoon to tell her we got here okay, she said that we left Memphis just in time. From the Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal:

Air-traffic outage: Communications failure strands travelers at Memphis airport
By Jody Callahan (Contact)
Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Kay Wilson was supposed to be in Little Rock Tuesday night, preparing for a talk with educators this morning.

Instead, she spent most of Tuesday afternoon plopped in the Memphis International Airport, reading "The Nine," the new book about the U.S. Supreme Court.
Passengers spent some unscheduled downtime Tuesday at Memphis International Airport after a communications problem bedeviled an air-traffic control facility.

Mark Weber/The Commercial Appeal
Passengers spent some unscheduled downtime Tuesday at Memphis International Airport after a communications problem bedeviled an air-traffic control facility.
Tara Rivera of Wynne, Ark., uses an old-school phone to tell her husband about a delay in her trip to San Antonio, Texas.

Mark Weber/The Commercial Appeal
Tara Rivera of Wynne, Ark., uses an old-school phone to tell her husband about a delay in her trip to San Antonio, Texas.

Wilson was one of thousands of airline passengers affected by a communications failure at a Memphis air-traffic control facility Tuesday.

Beginning about 11:30 a.m., the loss of communications shut down all inbound and outbound flights at the airport while redirecting numerous other flights away from Memphis airspace.

The failure left an odd sight reminiscent of 9/11: in the early afternoon, not a single plane could be seen in the air.

Although communications were restored and flights began taking off from the Memphis airport again just after 2 p.m., the delay caused untold headaches for passengers.

"I'm to speak at 9 a.m. and I don't know how I'm going to get there," said Wilson, a Fort Worth, Texas, resident who works for the organization that administers the SAT. "I can't get a car, even though I just turned one in, because they're out of cars."

The failure didn't affect the air-traffic control facility at the airport, but instead a nearby regional facility, said Federal Aviation Authority spokesman Kathleen Bergen.

That facility is responsible for controlling flights at higher altitudes in a roughly 250-mile radius of Memphis. The airport center is, in turn, responsible for all planes taking off and landing here. The airport center wasn't affected by the failure.

Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority executive vice president Scott Brockman said the outage, while frustrating, didn't present any significant safety problems.

"There's tremendous overlap in the system. In my mind, there was no safety concern for any of the aircraft in the air," Brockman said. "It has definitely been more of a frustration than anything."

However, local air-traffic controller Ron Carpenter, who was on duty in the regional center when the failure occurred, disagreed.

Carpenter, also president of the Memphis air-traffic controller's union, said the facility lost three radar sites as well as telephone lines, prompting controllers to use personal cell phones to contact other facilities.

"If we had not found a way to try to communicate with those airplanes, then bad things could have happened," Carpenter said. "At Tupelo airport, we had two airplanes inbound at the same time. And all of a sudden, we're not talking to them. They're both heading for the same airport. This whole outage was very unsafe."

Although early speculation on the cause centered on a lightning strike or a construction accident, blame was eventually placed on an equipment failure at a Memphis AT&T facility.

"The service disruption was a result of equipment failure. The company is conducting a comprehensive investigation to determine the cause of the equipment failure," AT&T spokesman Cathy Lewandowski said in a statement.

Northwest Airlines spokesman Jim Herlihy said the failure caused 13 cancellations and 19 diversions, but he couldn't specify how many flights were delayed.

FedEx Express diverted about 11 flights to other cities, but all headed back to Memphis by midafternoon, spokesman Sandra Munoz said.

Still, the outage left many at the airport with frayed tempers, standing and staring at the arrivals and departures display. Wilson, though, remained calm despite her frustration.

"This is my 61st flight this calendar year," said Wilson, wearing down her cell phone battery trying to find a replacement speaker in case she didn't make it to Little Rock. "You learn that hysterics and temper tantrums don't do a bit of good."

Posted by Unknown | 8:18 AM | 0 Comments |

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