LAT: Outages Highlight Internal FAA Rift

[question everything]

latimes.com

Outages Highlight Internal FAA Rift
By Jennifer Oldham
Times Staff Writer

October 3, 2006

When a string of air traffic control equipment malfunctions repeatedly disrupted air service in Southern California this summer, congressional leaders and airport executives questioned whether systemic problems were to blame.


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Technicians argue that a decade-old shift in the FAA's maintenance philosophy is partly to blame for outages in Southern California this summer. Formerly, the agency would allow technicians to spend time getting familiar with systems, so when something went wrong, they spotted it quickly. Today, the agency employs an approach that allows it to cut staff by relying in part on remote monitoring and on-call technicians, and to lengthen maintenance intervals, technicians say. FAA officials say staffing and maintenance were not factors. Rather, the problems were caused by technical glitches in each system and are in no way linked to one another, they said.

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The system outages in Southern California reflect a growing debate about how well the FAA is balancing modernizing the nation's aging air traffic control network with maintaining sensitive equipment used to direct thousands of flights a day through the country's airspace — all with dwindling appropriations from Congress.

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The testy relationship between the FAA and its technicians is likely to be strained further in the next few years as the agency makes crucial decisions about whether to keep its existing system or buy new equipment, said John Hensman, an aeronautics and astronautics professor and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's International Center for Air Transportation.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-faa3oct03,1,2689212.story