Air traffic on the Eastern Seaboard was getting back to normal Saturday evening after a major air traffic control system failure earlier in the day. The travel plans of thousands of people were upset when the flightplan processing computers went down at Washington Center around midday. The FAA had the system back about 4:15 p.m. but hundreds of flights had been cancelled and many of the affected travelers won’t get to their destinations until Sunday. The FAA sent a tweet out saying the system had been fixed but it still hasn’t said what went wrong. Unnamed “federal officials” were quoted by the Washington Post as saying that there was no indication the problem was caused by a hack. As is normal with these sorts of things, Sunday dawned without any sign there had been a problem the day before but there were weather problems in the South.
Traffic was still moving during the outage but capacity was cut substantially. Since the Washington TRACON couldn’t hand off traffic to Washington Center, outbound flights from Baltimore, Dulles and Reagan airports had to be handled by the TRACON until they could be handed off to another center. Likewise, the TRACON had to accept handoffs from other centers to get them into those facilities. Flights that would normally transit Washington Center’s airspace were either delayed or rerouted.
