Power Outage Caused Airport Radar to Fail

The power outage that struck the western United States last weekend caused part of the radar system at Burbank Airport to fail for about 10 minutes, a Federal Aviation Administration official said Friday.

The radar system, which never lost the ability to show air-traffic controllers the blips representing aircraft, was unable to display flight information such as airplane altitude, identification or destination, said Mitch Barker, an FAA spokesman.

The situation was never dangerous because air-traffic controllers were able to speak directly to pilots and the full system was restored within minutes, Barker said.

“It’s an inconvenience,” he said. “It’s not a hazard. It’s not a danger.”

Officials said similar problems were not reported at other area airports, including Los Angeles International Airport.

The missing information at Burbank Airport apparently was caused when regular electrical power was lost and the backup generator systems kicked in, officials said.

“In this case the engineers reset the system and [the complete flight information] came up,” Barker said. “There’s nothing much to do at this point.”

Warren Morningstar, a spokesman for the Maryland-based Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn., said such incidents are unusual “stress raisers,” but are not necessarily dangerous.

A series of backup techniques known by pilots and air traffic controllers allows safe operation even if the situation calls for going back to the days of communicating without any radar, he said.

“When the system hiccups it’s not instant disaster,” Morningstar said. “No system is absolutely fail proof.”

Barker said air-traffic controllers are trained to handle such situations. The controllers are skilled at remembering which blip on their screen represents which aircraft and they know to contact the pilots if there is any question, he said.

“We select people who are adept at this kind of thinking,” he said. “I have no reason to think there was any panic. They don’t panic very easily.”

Morningstar said the biggest hazard about losing radar for long periods is that efficiency drops because it takes more time to handle the same volume of traffic.

Local airport officials said airport operations remained smooth throughout the power outage. When the outage occurred, the passenger terminal lights flickered briefly before backup generators took over, but there was no interruption of ground services, officials said.

“We had no loss of service or power at the airport whatsoever,” said Sean McCarthy, an airport spokesman. “It was not an emergency situation.”