FAA Says Computer Glitch Fixed

The Federal Aviation Administration says a glitch in its computer system that caused widespread flight cancellations and delays nationwide Thursday has been fixed.

The FAA confirmed to CBS News that their main flight processing system is now back up and running, CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes reports.

The problem was with the FAA's system that collects airlines' flight plans. It was the second time in 15 months that a glitch in the flight plan system caused delays.

The agency still requires some time to reboot its residual systems, but FAA officials told Cordes that flights should get back to normal fairly quickly.

The FAA is still investigating exactly what went wrong, but there has been no talk about cyberterrorism at this point, Cordes reports. Officials think the problem was more likely caused by some kind of computer glitch.

The air traffic controllers union says the computer failure involved both of the FAA's computer centers in Salt Lake City and Atlanta.

Even though the FAA said Thursday the problem had been solved, Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Union, said controllers were still entering flight plans manually into computers in some locations.

Earlier, FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said she didn't know how many flights were being affected or which computer center was affected.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world's busiest airport, has been particularly affected. The FAA had issued a "ground stop" there, Cordes reports.

A spokesman for AirTran Airways tells CBS News that 22 of their flights have been cancelled. The cancellations immediately affect 2,000 people but will have a ripple effect for tens of thousands of passengers. Hartsfield-Jackson serves as a major hub for AirTran's flights, according to the route map on the airline's Web site.

CBS News correspondent Barry Bagnato reports that some flights are getting in and out of Atlanta. Delta Air Lines is experiencing “significant delays and cancellations” across the country, not just in Atlanta. There are no indications of when things will return to normal, Bagnato reports.

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Mary Rulo, an educator from Atlanta, was trying to get to Philadelphia for a conference. She said her 9 a.m. flight was delayed until 3 p.m. and AirTran was not able to help with other arrangements.

"This is really going to affect my conference schedule," she said. "It's really frustrating."

In the meantime, Delta told Bagnato the airline will offer passengers flexible scheduling without charging passengers for changing their reservations.

American Airlines said several hundred of its flights are being delayed around the country today due to the FAA computer problem.

Tim Smith, a spokesman for the Fort Worth, Texas,-based airline, said the delays are running from a few minutes to a bit over an hour.

He said American was told the problem would be fixed soon, but he said "once you get behind, it tends to stay that way" throughout the day.

Bagnato also reports that airports experiencing delays ranging between 15 and 45 minutes include Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, Philadelphia International Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport outside Washington, D.C.

Another FAA spokesperson, Paul Takemoto, said the problem started between 5:15 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. EST. The outage is affecting mostly flight plans but also traffic management, such as ground stops and ground delays, he said.

Victor Santore, the National Air Traffic Controllers Union southern region vice president, said he began getting e-mail messages from air traffic controllers around 7 a.m. EST Thursday that the Atlanta-area computers had stopped processing flight plans.

Santore said some controllers were pulled away from their normal duties talking to airplanes or pulled off breaks to help enter the flight plans.

"When something crazy like this happens, we'll pull everybody onto the floor," Santore said. "Every airport at some point some will be affected ... (The delays) are going to ripple through the entire system."

Controllers in the congested New York area put about 20 miles between planes in the air instead of the typical 8 miles, to create extra safety buffers, Cordes reports.

Regarding flight plans, airplane dispatchers are now sending plans to controllers and controllers in turn are entering them into computers manually, he said.

"It's slowing everything down. We don't know yet what the impact on delays will be," Takemoto said.

An AirTran Airways spokesman said there's no danger to flights in the air, and flights are still taking off and landing.

However, spokesman Christopher White said flight plans are having to be loaded manually because of a malfunction with the automated system.

"Everything is safe in the air," White said.

The FAA said in a statement that it is having a problem processing flight plan information.

"We are investigating the cause of the problem," the agency said. "We are processing flight plans manually and expect some delays. We have radar coverage and communications with planes."

Passengers are being asked to check the status of their flights online before going to airports.

Flight plans are collected by the FAA for traffic nationwide at two centers — one in the Salt Lake City area and the other in the Atlanta area, Bergen said.

In August 2008, a software malfunction delayed hundreds of flights around the country.

In that episode, the Northeast was hardest hit by the delays because of a glitch at the Hampton, Ga., facility that processes flight plans for the eastern half of the U.S.

The FAA said at that time the source of the computer software malfunction was a "packet switch" that "failed due to a database mismatch."

CBS "Evening News" producer Carter Yang reports that the system, the National Airspiace Data Interchange Network, also experienced an outage in June 2007. Those outages, Yang reports, were not necessarily as widespread as today's travel disruption.

The practical ramifications of this problem are that the entire air traffic control system on the East Coast is slowed to about 40-50 percent of what a normal day would look like.