LAX Officials Ask FAA to Probe System Failure

Los Angeles International Airport officials on Tuesday demanded that the Federal Aviation Administration investigate why a momentary power outage caused radar and communications systems at the control tower to malfunction, delaying nearly 100 incoming flights.

Though the FAA said its contingency plans mostly worked during Monday’s power failure, airport administrators and air-traffic controllers expressed alarm that some equipment took up to five hours to start working again.

“If everything went according to plan, a [brief] outage wouldn’t have even been noticeable in the tower. Instead, we got all these delays,” said Paul Haney, spokesman for Los Angeles World Airports. “We want a comfort level that they’ve got a plan in place and that we all know what it is.”

Tower controllers on duty during the power outage said they had never seen a system failure like it -- even during the 1996 blackout that hit much of the West Coast.

“We’ve been through individual equipment failures before, but nothing like this,” said Jack Brine, who has worked at the LAX control tower for 10 years. Whatever caused the power outage “took down almost everything at once.”

Authorities believe that a bird stepping on an electrical line a few blocks from LAX caused the power failure. All at once, Brine said, controllers had to deal with the loss of some radar as well as an instant computer connection with a flight control center in San Diego. In addition, controllers were temporarily unable to operate the runway lights.

FAA officials, who are responsible for aviation operations at LAX, said they were trying to determine exactly what went wrong.

Two backup power sources are supposed to activate immediately if electricity to the airport is cut. The system is designed to prevent the control tower from ever losing power by having backup batteries ready.

FAA technicians now believe that power went off in the control tower and LAX administrative building because the backup batteries somehow failed to turn on. The power loss, which lasted less than a second, was enough to cause key equipment to shut down, said Donn Walker, an FAA spokesman.

“We’re trying to find out why the batteries didn’t work,” Walker said. “On April 2, we experienced another power bump, and the batteries worked fine then.”

The control tower’s communications system has backup batteries of its own, but they failed as well, and the system took three hours to fix the problem.

It took five hours to bring the ground radar back on-line.

Despite the problems, controllers said they were able to keep the roughly 70 planes in the air at the time of the outage on track with help from their colleagues at the regional control center in San Diego.

“We went to backup radios.... We called up San Diego on the phone,” Brine said. “It’s not like we’re sitting there worried about how to respond.”

The San Diego air-traffic center was able to maintain communication with all planes in the air, but jets had to circle LAX for up to 90 minutes. Air-traffic controllers coordinated landings with San Diego through the radar systems that were working.

“It’s unexpected, but we were prepared for it,” Brine said. “We train all the time. This is what we’re paid for.”

LAX and airline officials said the outage and equipment malfunctions happened on a particularly busy day -- one day after Easter and in the season for spring breaks. Planes were almost full, with 91% capacity on flights leaving and arriving at LAX.

“It’s one of our busiest days of the year,” said airport spokesman Haney. He noted that the delays would take a financial toll on airlines because of extra fuel needed by circling planes, accommodations for passengers who missed connecting flights, and overtime for airport workers.

“It would take some time to calculate the costs, but delays of this kind have a ripple effect,” he said.

In the letter sent Tuesday to the FAA, the airport and several airlines said the tower’s equipment failure was “disruptive and costly to airline operations nationwide.”

“We would hope that Monday’s incident at LAX will lead to a timely assessment of the problem and prompt corrective action,” the letter stated.

LAX officials also asked to be included in the FAA’s contingency planning for emergencies such as blackouts, and for a representative they could meet with about such issues.

FAA spokesman Walker said his agency was looking at the letter and would address it soon. He also promised to share information as soon as FAA technicians discover why the backup batteries and other equipment failed.

Aviation consultant Billie Vincent, who was an air-traffic controller during the 1960s, remembers when the FAA first installed backup batteries in major airports. He recalled promises back then of foolproof, uninterrupted power.

“In theory it works great, but on one of the first days we had it installed, a power failure took us down,” said Vincent, a former head of security for the FAA.

“Anything man makes, there’s potential failure. So, you try to make it as nearly perfect as possible. In this case, they’re going to have to keep trying.”