 MATHER, Calif. (KCBS) -- Bay Area airports temporarily lost the ability to track aircraft Saturday when their radars shut down for about 10 minutes due to a mechanical failure at a Tuolumne County control center.
At around 10 a.m. the radar flickered, came back on, then completely went blank. The backup system took over a minute to kick in, and during that time the air traffic controllers were more or less blind.
When it returned, controllers could see the planes but not identify which airline they belonged to.
Steve Hefley President of the Northern California Terminal Radar Approach Control Center in Mather says that lingering problems continued throughout the afternoon.
Had there been another glitch, Hefley says surrounding facilities would have had to take over the districts airspace, which includes San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento International, and all of the satellite airports in the area.
He said there were no reports of close calls, but had the outage occurred 10 minutes before Hefley says that it would have coincided with a large number of arrivals at both SFO, and Oakland.
Technicians don't yet know what caused the failure.
Hefley says that in an attempt to save money, the FAA combined FOUR different control centers, Oakland, Stockton, Monterey, and Sacramento into one building with one single feed. |
