Washington — Flight operations at two Dallas-area airports returned to normal on Saturday as the Federal Aviation Administration detailed failures by a telecommunications company it said led to more than 2,000 flight disruptions.
American Airlines, the largest carrier at Dallas Fort Worth Airport, said more than 100,000 passengers were affected after telecom issues that began on Friday at about 2pm local time and were not resolved until Saturday morning.
American said it was forced to cancel 530 flights on Friday, 160 flights Saturday and had to divert another 65 flights that had been bound for Dallas.
Southwest Airlines, the largest carrier at Dallas Love Field, delayed more than 1,100 flights Friday, or a quarter of its operations, and more than 200 Saturday, but cancelled only one flight, according to Southwest and FlightAware, which tracks flights. Southwest said it had 580 extreme delays on Friday.
American, which also delayed more than 350 flights since Friday, warned there could be some additional operational affects.
The FAA said “multiple failures” of telecommunications data services provided by Frontier Communications led to the outage that affected the FAA’s Dallas terminal radar approach control, which handles operations for both Dallas airports.
Frontier has agreed to be acquired by Verizon Communications but the deal has not yet closed.
“Oversight by L3Harris, an FAA contractor, failed to ensure that redundancies in the system functioned properly,” the FAA said.
A Frontier spokesperson said a third-party contractor in Argyle, Texas, accidentally cut its fibre lines, affecting communication systems at the Dallas airports.
“Our team worked overnight, closely co-ordinating with the FAA and the airports to stabilise the systems, and as a result the airports are up and running today,” she said.
Reuters
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