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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| L.A. Airport Outage Snarls Air Traffic |
| 2004-04-12 |
| A brief failure of a power line shut down electrical service to the Los Angeles International Airport tower and disrupted air traffic Monday morning, authorities said. About 100 flights were affected, either having to hold in the air, circle or stay on the ground at their departure points for a time, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Donn Walker said. A 34.5 kilovolt supply line went out for 10 seconds at 9:38 a.m., city Department of Water and Power spokeswoman Carol Tucker said. "The cause is blamed on equipment failure," she said. Despite the immediate restoration of the power supply, the effect on the tower lasted longer. All radar, radios and telephones — essentially everything that controllers use to communicate with aircraft and other control facilities — was hit by the outage, Walker said. Shortly after 11 a.m., Walker reported that most power was back on but enough equipment remained out that instrument approaches would not be possible. Good weather made instrument approaches unnecessary, he said. Are power failures at airport control towers an unusual occurrance? Shouldn’t they have some sort of UPS system? Particularly in LAX ??? |
| Posted by:Seafarious |
| #6 I was resident engineer in the construction of San Diego's 911 center - as you all have pointed out, these backup systems are standard and kick in automatically til the diesel generator can power up and stabilize. Someone screwed the pooch big time on this |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-04-12 8:09:30 PM |
| #5 I cannot believe that the tower with its comm links does not have a standby generator and inverter system that floats on a battery bank, like almost every telco switch in the country. I am sure that enroute traffic control centers have that. Loss of comm means everyone enroute goes on backup procedures for maintaining flight level and when to shoot the approach. In the LA TRACON this would be an ABSOLUTE nightmare with many planes enroute and being sequenced for approach. This also could be a terrorist weapon, but so can anything else. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2004-04-12 7:15:57 PM |
| #4 I'm sure LAX has back-up generators, but the power wasn't out long enough for them to kick in. I've worked in enough Air Force units that had their own back-up generators to know that 10 seconds is too short to initiate the start-up sequence. Power would have had to have been out for a minimum of 30 seconds for the generators to start. Once they do trip, it takes another 20-50 seconds for the systems to come online, for them to "settle in" and become stable, and for all the other tweaks and twangs to happen before the power from the generators reaches the "customer". During that time, there are supposed to be backup systems (usually battery packs) that supply temporary power to the most critical components. Those should have kicked in immediately. The big questions that really need to be answered are did the emergency systems kick in as they should, were the right systems identified as critical, and have the bosses been diligent enough in the past about keeping too much garbage from being tacked on to drain the power too quickly. We'll probably never know the answers to those questions, but I HOPE the Airport Administrator gets an ear-full! |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2004-04-12 7:00:19 PM |
| #3 My guess is that the control tower would have both battery and generator (natural gas or diesel) back-ups. I will also bet that some maintenance supervisor is getting his ass kicked as we write. In a two words: "absolutely inexcusible." |
| Posted by: GK 2004-04-12 6:14:21 PM |
| #2 For a facility as large as a control tower, you would really want a standby diesel generator of the correct size that would automatically switch on when there was no power available at the bus. Note the bus has to be automatically isolated from the normal power system as the diesel will not be aligned with respect to phases. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-04-12 4:57:59 PM |
| #1 If power is restored in a timely fashion, will Richard Clarke credit the Clinton administration's laser-like focus on back-up power generation at LAX? |
| Posted by: Tibor 2004-04-12 4:45:20 PM |