Flight cancellations that stranded travelers across the U.S. will take days to unwind as the government works for the next two weeks to fix a Chicago-area air-traffic center crippled by a worker’s alleged sabotage.
More than 400 flights have been scrubbed for today after 900 were erased yesterday because of traffic limits at Chicago’s airports, according to industry-tracking site FlightAware.com. The Federal Aviation Administration said it was making progress and expects to have the fire-damaged center in Aurora, Illinois, fully online on Oct. 13.
Authorities say a contract employee started a fire Friday at regional control center in suburban Aurora and then attempted to commit suicide. More than 2,000 flights were canceled that day at O’Hare and Midway international airports, disrupting travel nationwide.
About 300 flights were canceled Monday at O’Hare. There were none at Midway, but delays were about 40 minutes.
The FAA said crews are working to install replacement equipment. Aurora’s air traffic controllers are at other FAA offices in the Midwest.
“The issue now is you’ve got so many crews and planes out of place,” said George Hamlin, a transportation consultant in Fairfax, Virginia. “You’ve got the chess pieces spread all over the board now and you need to get them all where they are supposed to be before things can get moving.”
The industry typically flies planes with at least 80 percent of seats full, he said. “With the small number of empty seats available, trying to accommodate a whole day’s worth of passengers — you do the math,” Hamlin said. “It could be three to five days before that all gets sorted out.”
While airlines have faced similar delays due to storms or computer malfunctions, “that’s actually easier in the sense that at some point the weather stops being bad and you can restore the schedule,” said Robert W. Mann, an aviation consultant and former executive at American Airlines. “Here, it’s unclear what kind of restoration schedule they’ll be facing.”
The chief of the Federal Aviation Administration has ordered the agency to review the contingency plans and security protocols of all its major facilities. The incident has exposed the ease in which one man could take down the travel infrastructure of the United States.
Just image if a terrorist organization such as the Islamic State coordinated an attack at key locations across the nation.
The order from Administrator Michael P. Huerta came three days after the contractor set fire to the FAA air traffic facility in Aurora, Illinois.
The Sept. 26 fire at Aurora’s Chicago En Route Center, about 40 miles west of Chicago, hobbled traffic out of O’Hare and Midway and led to more than 2,000 cancellations around the U.S. that day. The site oversees high-altitude traffic across the Midwest.
Authorities arrested Brian Howard, 36, a contract worker at the center, after they found him in the basement of the building cutting his throat, according to a court filing. Howard, of Naperville, Illinois, was charged in U.S. District Court in Chicago with destruction of aircraft facilities.
the fire crippled the system and led to thousands of disrupted flights in and out of Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports.
“The air transportation system is vital to our economy and people rely on it to function 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Huerta said in a statement. “I want to make sure that we have the most robust contingency plans possible.”
It is disturbing that 13 years after 911, we are just now considering “robust contingency plans” for the world’s biggest transportation system.