FAA Outage Reveals Odd, Fragile Computing Practices

WASHINGTON - The computer failure that snarled air traffic across the country last week has been traced to a single corrupted file in one of the Federal Aviation Administration's two flight-plan processing systems — and to the discovery that both systems were running on the same aging network.

The four-hour outage in Atlanta forced controllers to enter flight plans by hand, delaying more than 600 flights from coast to coast at the height of the afternoon rush.

The FAA said a software routine deleted a crucial data file, and that the backup system in Salt Lake City failed to take over because both centers shared network equipment. The agency has ordered the systems physically separated.

The incident was the second major FAA technology failure in a year and has become Exhibit A in the fight over funding the agency's $40 billion "NextGen" modernization, which would replace radar with satellite-based tracking.

"We are running a 21st-century aviation system on mid-20th-century technology, held together in places with the computing equivalent of baling wire," a member of the House aviation subcommittee said.

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Associated Press writers contributed to this report.

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