Contact Lost With Planes One By One As FAA Fire Spread

Oct. 3, 2014

Within minutes, radar feeds, flight plans and other data controllers rely on to direct more than 6,000 aircraft a day above five U.S. states had vanished.

Source Bloomberg

The Sept. 26 outage, blamed on a suicidal communications technician, was the worst case of sabotage in the history of the nation’s air-traffic control system.

The first radio links with pilots were lost just as the pre-dawn crush of flights intoChicago began.

Air-traffic controllers in a nondescript Federal Aviation Administration building about 40 miles from the city switched to backup channels. Then those failed. They tried emergency connections, which also went dead.

Within minutes, radar feeds, flight plans and other data controllers rely on to direct more than 6,000 aircraft a day above five U.S. states had vanished as a fire was being set in a communications room one floor below.

More details here.