DOT IG Responds to ATC Outages in California

In a November 7 response to a request by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the DOT Inspector General’s office reviewed a recent series of ATC equipment outages in Southern California, as well as a problem with a runway-incursion alerting system at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The review found that the FAA is taking “short-term corrective actions” regarding a July 18 power outage at Los Angeles Center, “and we recommend that it undertake a program to solve this problem and prevent its reoccurrence at other locations nationwide.” Several factors contributed to the multiple failures of an ILS in July and August, according to the review, and “given [the] FAA’s problems identifying the underlying causes of the failures, it must maintain a proactive monitoring and troubleshooting effort on this system.” The DOT IG review also noted the incursion-alert system was shut off before a July 26 near collision between two aircraft. “We are also including LAX in our ongoing review of [the] FAA’s actions to identify and correct the causes of runway incursions at Boston Logan, Chicago O’Hare and Philadelphia International Airports.”