Spy plane disrupts air traffic control

“A Cold War-era spy plane caused the computer systems of a major air traffic control system in Southern California, to malfunction majorly. This incident resulted in region-wide air travel delays affecting hundreds of flights and thousands of passengers.”

Information on this article can be found here:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/faa-confirms-spy-plane-scrambled-air-traffic-control-california-n97751

According to the above article, “The U-2 spy plane, the same type of aircraft that flew high-altitude spy missions over Russia 50 years ago, passed through the airspace monitored by the L.A. Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, Calif., around 2 p.m. on Wednesday.”

This is amazing that a U-2 spy plane from the Cold War showed up again fifty years later. 

The U-2 spy plane was flying at 60,000 feet. The U-2 spy plane’s altitude and route overloaded the ERAM computer system that generates display data for air-traffic controllers. The spy plane also caused the computers back-up computer systems to fail.

Basically, the computer system malfunctioned and tracked the plane to be flying 10,000 feet or below when really it was flying at 60,000 feet. The system was built to control plane traffic to avoid collisions but in this case it was tracking planes that weren’t even close to each other.

“There were 27 cancellations of arriving flights, as well as 212 delays and 27 diversions to other airports. Twenty-three departing flights were cancelled, while 216 were delayed.” This happened at LAX. One of the busiest airports in the country. All these delays and cancellations were due to this U-2 spy plane throwing the whole system off.

The air traffic control computer system was repaired an hour later. In order to prevent this from happening again in the future the air traffic control computer system now requires specific altitude information for each plane.