Southern California TRACON Goes Mapless

In a copyrighted story today, the North County Times (north San Diego County, California) reported that Lindbergh Field (KSAN) traffic was returning to normal after a “radar control outage.” Here’s the story as printed…

Lindbergh Field air traffic returning to normal

By: North County Times

SAN DIEGO —- A radar control outage early today affecting Southern California airports wasn’t having a major effect on air traffic at Lindbergh Field in San Diego, an air operations support employee said.

Heidi Connell said the problem between 4:45 and 6:30 a.m. might have been caused by an equipment upgrade at a facility that is responsible for air traffic control at Lindbergh and about 20 other airports, including the Los Angeles International Airport.

“But there are no departures from San Diego until 6:30,” she said.

However, the radar glitch did affect incoming flights during that time and that was causing some delays, said Connell.

“There were slight delays in the beginning, but in a few hours it should be just about normal,” she said. “It was a ground stop and nothing was flying.”

Anyone meeting planes or flying out should check with the airlines to be sure planes are arriving and leaving on time, she said.

The radar interruption came at the start of the three-day Memorial Day weekend, when air travel is very busy.

Of course, as it turns out it wasn’t a radar outage, and the problems at Lindbergh weren’t the epicenter of the problem. The actual problem was automation-related and affected all southern California airspace (to be fair, a point mentioned by the author).

At 1250Z on 25 May 2007 the FAA’s ARTCC issued a ground stop for Southern California TRACON airspace, declaring ATC Zero for SCT because no maps were available at any control position. All IFR traffic in, out, and through SCT airspace was stopped until such time as ZLA (LA Center) could pick up the airspace. However, by around 1335Z SCT was back in business and the ground stop was lifted. Throughout, the TRACON’s radar (secondary and primary) continued to work and air to ground communication was not affected. But no maps=no vectors…

And just like that we have an example of one of the problems with consolidated TRACONs: a facility-wide equipment outage is automatically a regional outage—something that the author of the North County Times article should gotten really excited about. For there was a time when an outage at one Southern California approach control would have impacted only a handful of airports (albeit large, busy airports), but today, the inability to bring up a map on a single ACD (ARTS Color Display) in this consolidated facility meant that commercial aviation in an entire region ground to a halt. That’s clearly problematic.

As a reminder, SCT is an FAA consolidated TRACON which combined the former Los Angeles, Burbank, Ontario, Coast (Orange County), and San Diego TRACONs into a single facility at Miramar MCAS in San Diego County. SCT is the busiest approach control in the world with over 2.2 million operations annually and its airspace covers over 17,000 square miles. ZLA airspace overlies SCT airspace in every sector.

In contrast, a pre-1995 automation failure at, say, Coast Approach, would have shut down only Coast Approach. Aircraft destined for Orange County (KSNA) could have been diverted to Los Angeles (KLAX) or San Diego (KSAN) or Ontario (KONT) and worked into those airports by their respective TRACONs. If the failure at Coast was expected to continue for some time, the Coast airspace could have been delegated to ZLA and the Center could have worked approaches into KSNA. Given the fact that ZLA is already understaffed and the controllers there are not particularly accustomed to working KSNA approaches, turning-over the airspace to the Center is not an optimal solution, but it is a reasonable, safe, and workable one, even though the arrival rate would be held very low.

Fast-forward to today. With a consolidated TRACON, a facility-wide outage takes down all of the airports in the region. And if you believe for one second that ZLA has the manpower to cover those airports, you’re deluding yourself. ZLA is supposed to be staffed to cover its own day-to-day operations, and even then it’s short-handed. To think that, in addition to its own traffic, it could suddenly work all of the traffic normally handled by the busiest approach control in the world is just nuts. If it could, you’d have to ask what those additional controllers are doing all day long up in Palmdale, and why we need to have a Southern California TRACON at all.

Today the SCT came back on line because they were able to heal the automation problem. But what if it’s not that easy? In 2003 SCT was evacuated because wild fires threatened the building and the effect was the same: IFR traffic in the region was suddenly ground stopped. One can easily imagine any number of nastier things which might threaten a building and result in much lengthier outages…

At this moment the FAA is working to bring the Palm Springs TRACON (KPSP) into the SCT fold, and it’s meeting resistance on a number of levels. That resistance got a shot in the arm this morning when SCT shut down but PSP stayed in business.

Look, I remain of two minds on the consolidated TRACON issue, and this rant shouldn’t be read as my having abdicated my position on the fence. It’s just that it’s hard to ignore the downside when it slaps you in the face.

Look for more on this topic in upcoming columns. Your comments are most welcome.

-Dave