Dec. 05--An equipment failure at Key West International Airport on Monday temporarily grounded daily flights into the Southernmost City on Southwest Airlines.
Monroe County Airports Director Peter Horton says one of two visual approach slope indicator systems, owned and maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration, went down at 10:25 but was fixed by noon.
The system is a series of runway-adjacent lights, red or white depending on the angle of viewing, that help a pilot achieve the appropriate angle to land the plane.
The net effect of the system going down was delays for passengers headed to Key West from Louis Armstrong New Orleans [La.] International Airport, Tampa International Airport and Orlando International Airport.
Horton says the flights from New Orleans and Orlando, arrived more than an hour behind schedule.
In a 12:42 p.m. e-mail to County Administrator Roman Gastesi, Horton wrote that "I contacted the FAA about the problem and they told me they would have to send a tech down from Miami to solve the problem.
"I felt that we didn't have the luxury of waiting for them to get here to fix it, so I directed our electrician to make the repair. As we suspected, the fix was a minor one," a burned-out light socket.
Some passengers in New Orleans were rerouted through Fort Lauderdale by Southwest ticket agents and instructed to rent a car on their own dime and drive to Key West, according to a passenger account.
That flight and the Orlando flight were both reinstated, although the Tampa route remained cancelled.
Horton says other operators that fly to Key West chose to rely on the second back-up system.
Dallas-based Southwest spokesman Dan Landson said company policy requires that both the primary and secondary vertical slope indicator alignment systems be working.
Speaking of Southwest, "They operate from an abundance of caution when they're dealing with a short runway," Horton says, based on phone calls with Southwest dispatchers.
Another factor was the wind direction, which necessitated a switch in landing approach from the typical west-to-east pattern to the opposite, which requires clearance from Naval Air Station Key West's Boca Chica Filed, Horton says.
"That only happens about 20 percent of the time," Horton says. "It was just a whole series of events that resulted in a bad situation."
He says, "We had about 100 people who were almost in panic mode.
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