FAA computers delay hundreds of flights - Again!

Hundreds of flights across the eastern United States were delayed from taking off for several hours due to a software failure at the Federal Aviation Administration air traffic center south of Atlanta.

Travelers in some of the nation's largest hubs, like Atlanta, were hit hardest. Some planes were delayed several hours after the National Airspace Data Interchange Network (Nadin) - which manages and coordinates flight plans in and out of U.S. airports—suffered a software glitch around 1:30 p.m. E.ST. The F.A.A. said bad weather triggered the problem. 

The F.A.A. says its computer problem was something they had not seen before.  But the same system failed just a week eariler, and a year ago as well.  "It looks like an internal software processing failure. But we're going to have to do some forensics on it to figure out exactly what the failure mode was."

An F.A.A. bulletin distributed to employees said "a Nadin failure last evening caused more than 100 delays after flight plans were rejected. The legacy Nadin in Atlanta crashed. Salt Lake City took over but had problems with the high queue level."

Asked whether the software failure in Atlanta, or the subsequent failure of the Salt Lake facility to take on all of the rerouted flight plans, was due to the software programming of an outside vendor, a server problem, or even human error, F.A.A. spokeswoman Laura Brown would only say that the agency would be looking into the situation.