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FAA Outlines Strategy to Recover from Air-Traffic Control Outages

The reassessment released Monday called on the FAA to strengthen its "overall security posture against both external and internal threats."

Tighter security has been implemented to "detect and counter insider threats" against the nation's radar facilities that direct airplanes, following the arson attack two months ago by a worker at an air-traffic control center west of Chicago, the Federal Aviation Administration said Monday.

But without increased funding from Congress, the FAA will be hard-pressed to achieve its goal of restoring the air-traffic system to 90 percent of normal operations within 24 hours of an emergency, the agency's administrator, Michael Huerta, warned.

"It will take resources," Huerta said in a telephone call with reporters. He said talks are underway with appropriations committees in Congress about the costs of redirecting radar, setting up new communications channels and addressing other technology needs.

Huerta released a report that called for an overhaul of contingency plans at major air-traffic facilities in the wake of an early morning fire Sept. 26 that destroyed communications equipment at Chicago Center in Aurora, which handles high-altitude traffic across seven Midwest states. When communications lines were severed, controllers at the center couldn't talk to pilots, track planes or process flight plan data.

Backup plans were launched to enable controllers to direct pilots to safe landings. But it was the most serious sabotage incident in FAA history, forcing the airlines to cancel thousands of flights and delay and strand passengers over almost two weeks. Airline losses were estimated at $350 million.

The changes announced Monday would lead to the ability to switch over radar tracking and voice and data communications links from one FAA facility to neighboring facilities to quickly divide up the responsibility for controlling planes, officials said. Part of achieving that in the event of an accidental or intentional outage requires replacing the manual handoff of an airline flight plan with an automated transfer.

The sabotage was allegedly committed by a disgruntled contract employee at Chicago Center, identified in a federal indictment as Brian Howard, 36, of Naperville. Howard, an employee of Harris Corp., wrote in a Facebook posting that he was angry about plans to transfer him to an FAA facility in Hawaii.

Huerta said Monday that the FAA was still tallying the costs of repairing the heavily damaged Chicago Center. Chicago Center reopened Oct. 13.

The revised contingency plans the FAA outlined would be carried out in three phases that could take a year to implement, Huerta said. They call for increasing the flexibility and speed of sharing air-traffic communications, flight-planning data and weather information among FAA facilities.

Huerta reiterated a point he made after the Chicago Center fire — that implementation of the FAA's satellite-based Next Generation Air Transportation System will play a key role in helping to work air traffic around facilities that are knocked offline. Airlines and congressional leaders have been highly critical of the FAA's slow progress toward getting NextGen programs into service.

"What the FAA did in terms of improvising after the Chicago Center fire was a miracle. I would compare it to the response after the Sept. 11 attacks," said William Parrot, a retired American Airlines captain who was based at O'Hare International Airport and now is an aviation professor at Lewis University in Romeoville. "But I don't think that even in the best of times NextGen would be ready to step in in the next few years and solve an emergency like we saw at Aurora."

The air-traffic reassessment released Monday also called on the FAA to strengthen its "overall security posture against both external and internal threats." It said the agency's security system has been focused almost exclusively on outside threats.

©2014 the Chicago Tribune