FAA Flight Delays: O'Hare, Midway Flights Back On Track After Computer Glitch Caused Delays

UPDATE: The FAA computer glitch has been resolved, though problems continue to ripple across the country from the nearly five hour computer outage. General delays at both O'Hare and Midway airports for departures and arrivals are less than 15 minutes, according to the FAA.

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A nationwide FAA computer system malfunction is causing flight delays at O'Hare and Midway Airports Thursday.

The program designed to automatically enter flight plans stopped working properly around 5:15 Thursday morning, forcing flight controllers to enter the information manually and leading to system-wide delays.

The flight plan includes the destinations, routes, weight and baggage information regarding the planes that take off and land from airports in the nation. The air traffic control systems have not been affected.

There were delays of about 30 minutes at Midway and 15 minutes at O'Hare as of 8:15 a.m., a spokeswoman for the city's Aviation Department told the Chicago Tribune. The Daily Herald is reporting 45 minute delays at Midway.

An FAA spokeswoman told CBS that she didn't know how many flights are being affected or when the problem will be resolved.

The city is expecting the delays to ripple throughout the morning and into the afternoon.

Comments

[QuietRockland]

09:25 PM on 11/21/2009

Regrettabl­y but predictabl­y, this week's FAA recidivist inability to maintain its own flight-con­trol equipment has already been mischaract­erized by special interests seeking to further their own political agendas – including mischaract­erization by New York Senator Charles Schumer.

The self-deali­ng touts would have you believe that the solution to FAA management incompeten­ce is to throw US$35,000,­000,000 more of YOUR dollars at the problem in the form of an ill-concei­ved 2009 FAA Reauthoriz­ation Bill (S. 1451/HR 915).

FAA's failure is the failure of humans. Corrupted humans. Not corrupted files. The failures include an FAA ‘Administr­ator' named Randy Babbitt - college drop-out and dim political hack.

Yet other humans have let us down, too. Almost a full year after an Administra­tion change, the remainder of the federal government has still failed to effect the timely thorough Oberstar-u­rged ‘Top-To-Bo­ttom' clean-out of inept vampiric FAA personnel still lurking the halls of 800 Independen­ce. Now they want to use their own incompeten­ce as the pretextual basis to suck-out US$35 Billion more of your American dollars.

We again urge Congress and the federal government to terminate S. 1451, say ABSOLUTELY NO! to the requested US$35 Billion Dollars of wasted FAA Reauthoriz­ation money, and fire feckless FAA management en masse. Let Randy Babbitt and his pack of fellow agency imposters now step aside in favor of responsibl­e profession­als who can actually regulate profession­alism, and who can actually remember where they left the keys to the tech-room!