The latest disturbing air traffic control incident in the US happened in Denver this week. The Federal Aviation Administration revealed Thursday that on Monday afternoon, air traffic control in the area went dark for 90 seconds due to an equipment failure, the Denver Post reports. During this time, pilots lost communication with the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center after transmitters covering some of the airspace went down. The FAA, which has opened an investigation into the incident, says that another frequency was used for air traffic controllers to communicate with pilots during the outage. Multiple sources who spoke to Denver 7, however, claim that up to 20 pilots were unable to connect with air traffic controllers for as long as six minutes before a controller used an emergency line to get a hold of one pilot, who then alerted others to change frequencies.
"Aircraft remained safely separated and there were no impacts to operations," the agency says in a statement, adding that radar operations were not impacted. The center is one of 22 in the US, covering 285,000 square miles over portions of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming, and mainly dealing with planes higher up in the sky and farther apart from one another. Its mission differs from the Newark Liberty International Airport air traffic control tower, which mainly guides planes departing and arriving at that particular airport, and which has been experiencing significant issues of late—bringing attention to aging FAA infrastructure, the Washington Post reports. (More air traffic controllers stories.)
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