Your Flight Has Been Delayed—and it's the FAA's fault!
Yesterday's Reason.tv video on the U.S. antiquated air-traffic control system eerily anticipated the major screw-ups currently being caused by the Federal Aviation Administration's computers.
FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said she doesn't know how many flights are being affected or when the problem will be resolved.
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.
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.
A problem with the FAA system that collects airlines' flight plans caused widespread flight cancellations and delays nationwide Thursday. It was the second time in 15 months that a glitch in the flight plan system caused delays.
Here's the video: