For the second time in a week, computer problems in a Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic control center caused flight delays in parts of the Northeast. Flights were also delayed in parts of the Southeast today.
FAA spokeswoman Alison Duquette said today's problems began at 6:15 a.m. when the air-traffic control center in Leesburg, Va., experienced a data-transfer problem between a peripheral device and the main computer, causing the main computer to overload.
Duquette said the center then made a transition from the main computer system, or Host and Oceanic Computer System Replacement, to a back-up system, or Direct Access Radar Channel.
The glitch caused delays of up to two hours in and out of New York's Kennedy and LaGuardia airports, Newark and Teterboro airports in New Jersey, Logan International Airport in Boston and Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, as well as Washington's Reagan National and Dulles airports and Baltimore-Washington International Airport in Maryland.
Duquette said the system came back up at 9:49 a.m. and was fully operational.
At 10 a.m., Duquette said the airports were still experiencing approximately 45-minute delays in departures.
"We do not know what caused the problem yet," she said. "But we do not think it was Y2K-related."
Monday night, a mainframe computer outage at the FAA's Air Traffic Control Center in Nashua, N.H., caused flight delays throughout the Northeast