November 19, 2009, 3:09 PM — The Federal Aviation Administration says that while it has fixed a computer glitch responsible for flight delays across the United States, possible flight holdups may still be in the cards.
An FAA spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that the computer malfunction occurred at around 5:30 a.m. EST this morning and that it resulted in long flight delays in Washington, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. The administration has pinpointed the problem as a failure of its National Airspace Data Exchange system in both of its locations in Atlanta and Salt Lake City. Although the system was restored at around 10 a.m. EST this morning, the FAA would not rule out further flight delays after the system had come back online.
As of 11:30 a.m. EST, an hour and a half after the glitch had been fixed, the Web site FlightStats.com still reported "excessive" flight delays in Atlanta and in Manchester, N.H., as well as for LaGuardia Airport in New York. JFK International Airport was only experiencing a low level of delays as of 11:30 a.m. EST.
The FAA network failure comes just a year after a similar outage occurred at the Georgia facility that caused multiple flight delays across the eastern United States, including flights departing from major Northeastern cities such as Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. The National Airspace Data Exchange in Georgia is primarily responsible for processing flight plans for the eastern half of the United States.
