For the FAA, a Please-Do List

The Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control center in Olathe, Mo., was 13 days away from getting through a year without a major system failure. It did not make it.

On Thursday, the center that controls 195,000 square miles of air traffic over the country’s midsection had a power failure that caused it to briefly lose contact with at least 300 aircraft. Officials and outside experts said that lives were not in danger during the few minutes of outage. But it was enough to raise a sweat among usually unflappable traffic controllers. “It was total pandemonium,” said one.

Thursday’s incident followed system failures at Olathe in 1995 and 1996. It was apparently caused when a technician inadvertently shut down both the main and backup power systems during a routine but ill-timed maintenance check. The failure was the result of a surge that hit when the system was powered up again.

So, you can now add one more thing to the Federal Aviation Administration’s “do” list, in addition to replacing all of those mainframe computers that are more than 20 years old. It can train folks to leave the on-off switches alone, particularly during those busy parts of the schedule in which there might be a few hundred planes aloft.

Kind of makes you feel safer already, doesn’t it?