FAA computer glitch in Salt Lake causes widespread U.S. air travel delays

ATLANTA — Air travelers nationwide scrambled to revise their plans Thursday after an FAA computer glitch caused widespread cancellations and delays for the second time in 15 months.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the problem, which lasted about four hours, was fixed around 9 a.m., but it was unclear how long flights would be affected.

It started when a single circuit board in a piece of networking equipment at a computer center in Salt Lake City failed around 5 a.m., the FAA said in a statement.

The Salt Lake City International Airport was not affected by the glitch.

"We had normal operations all morning," airport spokeswoman Barbara Gann. "We didn't have any impact at all."

Airport managers had been anticipating some delays but none occurred. Flights that left Salt Lake City for eastern U.S. cities were in the air when the glitch occurred and by the time they landed, the glitch was fixed. The time zone differences worked to the flights' advantage, Gann said.

Flights destined for Salt Lake City from other parts of the United States also weren't affected because the glitch did not occur in Salt Lake City, Gann said.

The computer failure prevented air traffic control computers in different parts of the country from talking to each other. Air traffic controllers were forced to type in complicated flight plans themselves because they could not be transferred automatically from computers in one region of the country to computers in another, slowing down the whole system.

Two large computer centers in Salt Lake City and near Atlanta were affected, as well as 21 regional radar centers around the country.

Delays were particularly bad at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world's busiest. The glitch also exacerbated delays caused by bad weather in the Northeast, with airports in the Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York metro areas reporting problems.

Some flights were more than two hours behind schedule. Airports around the South also reported delays and cancellations.

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, said the country's aviation system is "in shambles" and the FAA needs more resources to prevent such problems from continuing.

"If we don't deliver the resources, manpower, and technology the FAA it needs to upgrade the system, these technical glitches that cause cascading delays and chaos across the country are going to become a very regular occurrence," he said in a statement.