FAA Flight Delays: What Happened; What Does It Mean and Where Are We Now?

ABC News reported that flights were being delayed nationwide by an "unknown computer glitch" within the Federal Aviation Administration. ABC says the issue was not a safety issue, but that it forced air traffic controllers to increase the distance between flights – something that effectively reduces an airport's landing capacity. New York airports, for example, are operating at about 50% of normal capacity during the glitch, ABC reported Wednesday on Good Morning America.

Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said she doesn't know how many flights is being affected or when the problem will be resolved.

Another FAA spokesperson, Paul Takemoto, said the problem started between 5:15 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. EST (1015 and 1030 GMT). The outage is affecting mostly flight plans but also traffic management, such as ground stops and ground delays, he said.

Regarding flight plans, airplane dispatchers are now sending plans to controllers and controllers in turn are entering them into computers manually, he said.

"It's slowing everything down. We don't know yet what the impact on delays will be," Takemoto said.

Update (11/19/09): FAA officials say failed computers that delayed flights across the country are now working again.

The air traffic controllers union says the computer failure involved both of the Federal Aviation Administration's computer centers in Salt Lake City and Atlanta.

Even though the FAA said Thursday the problem had been solved, Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Union, said controllers were still entering flight plans manually into computers in some locations.