The Story Behind the FAA Flight-Plan System Crash

The FAA recently spent millions of dollars updating its antiquated Philips mainframe system with a new one that uses Stratus Technologies high-performance servers and other elements from Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems and other first-tier IT suppliers. The old system, which went online in 1988 and served the FAA well for two decades, was approaching its end of life and had suffered a series of breakdowns in the last few years. However, the new IT system was not the issue Nov. 19.

The FAA utilizes the NADIN (National Airspace Data Interchange Network) communications link for the flight-plan system. The two NADIN sites in Salt Lake City and Hampton, Ga.—along with including the 21 other FAA IT stations—no longer use a multipath communications backbone composed of many different redundant links.

As mandated by the Bush administration in 2001, all the communications links that previously were government-owned and maintained by FAA employees were contracted to Harris, under the $2.4 billion FTI contract.

Rep. Jerry Costello issued the following statement Nov. 19 regarding the outage:

"While today's incident could have been much worse, anytime you have a system-wide outage it needs to be thoroughly reviewed and it brings up several questions that the FAA needs to address. Why did it take four hours to locate a seemingly small technical problem, and why did it have a system-wide effect? Is the FAA's oversight of its contract with the Harris Corporation sufficient? The relationship between the FAA and its vendors is a critical one, given that the transition to the Next Generation Air Transportation System will require more such partnerships. Our staff is discussing these questions with the FAA and we will continue to explore these issues. In addition, Chairman Oberstar and I have asked the Department of Transportation Inspector General to conduct a 60-day study of the outage and FAA's corrective action plan."

Harris spokesperson Marc Raimondi told eWEEK that people should keep in mind that weather conditions cause most flight delays, and that the FTI system used by the FAA has a very good performance record. "Five nines—maybe even nine nines of efficiency," Raimondi said.

Raimondi issued the following statement from Harris: "We're working with the FAA to evaluate the interruption in order to prevent similar outages in the future. FTI has proven to be one of the most reliable and secure communications networks operating within the civilian government. Safety and security are the highest priorities."