O'Hare woes continue

I swear, someone either has placed a hex on O'Hare (like Peter Fitzgerald), or someone in the O'Hare Airport in-house PR dept. is going to loose a little sleep this weekend. Not only is the Federal Govt sniffing around regarding 1. the O'Hare expansion and 2. frequent flight delays, but the 3. whole system crashed today (not to mention 4. last month's power outage fiasco).

From the Trib

A computer glitch grounded American Airlines and US Airways flights from coast to coast Sunday morning, causing delays that were expected to last all day. American had its planes back up after two hours, while US Airways flights were grounded for about three.

Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Diane Spitaliere said the FAA was alerted to the problem, and both carriers asked the FAA's air traffic controllers to help communicate with planes to keep them on the ground until the problems were fixed.

US Airways spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said the airline's flight-operation database malfunctioned, due to "an internal technology problem." A similar problem affected American's flight plan system, grounding about 150 flights, spokesman John Hotard said.

Both airlines use a computer system hosted by Plano-based Electronic Data Systems Corp. An EDS spokesman said an "extensive internal evaluation" was under way to determine what happened.

From Fitzgerald's web site, in part,

U.S. Senator Peter G. Fitzgerald (R-Illinois) said today that delay controls, pejoratively called “flight caps” by the airlines, are needed at O’Hare International Airport to reduce delays and ensure safety, and urged U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta to impose them as soon as possible.

“What’s happening at O’Hare is an insult to airline customers and an assault on air travel schedules across the country,” Sen. Fitzgerald said. “The airlines regularly schedule more flights than O’Hare is able to handle and then blame the inevitable delays on the weather or the FAA.”

Fitzgerald made the comments after Mineta called a meeting of the O’Hare air carriers in Washington D.C. next week to try to hammer out voluntary flight reductions. Although Congress removed delay controls from O’Hare and other airports in 2002, it gave the Transportation Secretary authority to impose new restrictions to ameliorate delays if the need arises. Fitzgerald predicted the airlines wouldn’t be able to reach agreement on a sufficient reduction plan and said that Mineta ought to act quickly on delay controls if the airlines don’t immediately come to agreement on aggressive reductions.

“We shouldn’t dance around the obvious,” he said. “Delay controls are needed at O’Hare, and we ought to put them in place right away.”