An FAA computer glitch in Salt Lake City caused havoc 2,000 miles away at La Guardia Airport yesterday.
Dozens of flights at La Guardia and at Philadelphia International Airport were delayed as the system stopped allowing flight plans to be loaded into the computer network, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Jim Peters said.
The FAA has two central computer systems, one in Salt Lake City and the other in Atlanta. The Atlanta system went down for a time Thursday night, and yesterday the same problem occurred in Salt Lake City.
This affected all airlines leaving La Guardia and Philadelphia, but the delays had a ripple effect and caused problems around the country, Peters said.
Even though technicians fixed the problem at around 1 p.m. yesterday, the damage had already been done. Delays on arriving and departing flights continued until last night.
JetBlue, for instance, had 32 flights scheduled to arrive at or depart from La Guardia yesterday, a spokesman said, calling the impact “significant.”
AMR Corp.’s American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner acknowledged the computer troubles and said the nation’s largest carrier experienced about 50 cancellations on the East Coast, with La Guardia departures being hit the hardest.
With Post Wire Services