U.S. Federal Aviation Administration contingency plans to restore major ATC functions in the event of an emergency like the Chicago center fire in September maintain safety but do not include target levels of efficiency in the response, the agency found after its 30-day review of the incident. The review also revealed that the FAA must improve its security against insider threats as a result of the fire, which was started by a disgruntled contractor.
Senior transportation officials said the review, which the FAA released on November 24, points to the need to accelerate component systems of the NextGen ATC modernization, namely the National Airspace System Voice System, which will standardize voice switches between ATC facilities, and system wide information management (Swim), which will enable different IT systems to interoperate.
An employee of Harris Corporation, the prime contractor for the FAA’s telecommunications infrastructure, set the September 26 fire at the Chicago air route traffic control center in Aurora, Ill., which controls high-altitude traffic over five states. The fire destroyed the telecommunications system that processes the center’s flight-plan data and enables communications between controllers and aircraft, disrupting thousands of flights. The FAA transferred control of high-altitude traffic to neighboring en route centers in Minneapolis, Kansas City, Cleveland and Indianapolis. Nearly 200 Chicago center employees traveled to other facilities during the outage to assist them in managing Chicago center traffic. The FAA announced the restoration of traffic levels in percentage steps at Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports, the two airports the fire directly affected, until it fully restored service on October 13. Over 17 days, FAA and Harris technical teams replaced and tested 20 racks of equipment, 835 circuits and more than 10 miles of cable.
“The FAA ensured airplanes and passengers landed safely when disaster struck; that was the top priority and we did it,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in announcing the results of the FAA incident review. “But we can and will improve our contingency plans for efficiency. We have a national infrastructure deficit facing our nation from which the national aviation system is not immune. The FAA needs a stable and reliable funding stream to fully implement NextGen, which will further reduce delays and service disruptions.”
The FAA Air Traffic Organization review found that “current infrastructure and air traffic management systems are robust, but have limited technical flexibility to support operational contingencies.” The current ATC system can be reconfigured to adapt to emergencies “but the time it takes for this to occur is measured in days, when today’s system demands that it be measured in hours.” In the area of security, the FAA has focused its efforts against external threats, “but nascent efforts to detect and counter insider threats must be expanded and accelerated.” The review recommends “refinements in the risk assessment approach, adjustments in policies and processes, and enhancements in training and education in several areas across security layers.”
The review lays out a three-stage action plan that begins with the FAA reducing its response time to major facility outages “from days to hours” by working with telecommunications and automation system providers to make voice radios, radars, flight-planning data and weather and aeronautical information readily available. The second stage seeks to re-create specific sectors and services of an affected center “at surrounding facilities, thus allowing more effective use of personnel in an operation that more closely resembles normal activities.” The third stage calls for using NextGen technologies to bolster the system’s “resiliency, contingency and continuity” requirements.