Power Failure Shuts Down L.A. Air Traffic

The main enroute air traffic control center in Palmdale, CA has been shut down do to a power failure, effectively shutting down three major airports:

Flights in and out of three Southland airports have been halted because of a power failure affecting radar and the Southern California air traffic control system.

The affected airports are Los Angeles International Airport, Bob Hope Airport in Burbank and Ontario International Airport.

Federal Aviation Administration officials said power is returning "piece by piece." The outage, reported at 6 p.m., affected the FAA radar center in Palmdale.

"We lost everything," an FAA spokesman told The Associated Press. "We lost all power to phone lines, computers, everything."

Although the article doesn't mention Long Beach or John Wayne Airports, I have to believe they're down too since they also feed flights into the LA enroute center.

This reminds me of the last time we had an outage like this in Southern California. In October of 2003 I spent a weekend in Virginia doing some quartet work, and on Sunday as we were headed back to Dulles airport for the flight home we got a call from home stating that the inbound traffic to Southern California had been halted. A major fire burning in San Diego County had threatened the San Diego Air Traffic Control facility at Miramar Naval Air Station and the facility had to be evacuated. No radar, no flights.

We were scheduled to fly to Phoenix and change planes for a flight to LAX. At Dulles they told us we could get to Phoenix, but no further. Well, this isn't my first rodeo and I've had flight problems before, so I got on the phone to Budget car rental and reserved a car one-way from Phoenix to Los Angeles.

When we arrived in Phoenix several hours later, the airport was a madhouse. People and luggage were everywhere with folks frantically trying to figure out how to get to their California destinations. The airlines were telling folks that they might be stuck for as long as two or three days before they could get them on a plane.

Car rentals were no longer available to those trying to reserve on the spot, but after we found our luggage in the mess in the terminal, we went downstairs, picked up the keys to the car I reserved from Washington, and started a seven hour drive home. I was wiped out the next day, but we all got home in time for work on Monday.

I'm sure right now there are plenty of folks around the West Coast trying to figure out what they're going to do, just like we did in '03.