Fire in Chicago ARTCC... Again....

Slipkid65 said:
LOL......

Understood....

While I am fully aware that I am responsible for several billion (with a B ) dollars of liability every time I push the throttles up, not to mention the lives of hundreds of folks sitting behind me, I figure that if I make there alive, so will they........... and operate accordingly.
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Which is one reason why I would never get on a remotely-piloted airliner.
 
Authorities say it was set by a contract employee who also tried to commit suicide.

Well - here we go. The guy was a direct Harris employee, but the FAA facility was his permanent place of employment.

I go into a lot of high dollar facilities, I'll bet this is going to make it harder for me to access a lot of them. Ya know - just in case I might want to burn the place down or anything. I can see the hole in the security happening. I've been granted unescorted access to a lot of places that were pretty sensitive including several nuke reactors in the past.
 
docmirror said:
Authorities say it was set by a contract employee who also tried to commit suicide.

Well - here we go. The guy was a direct Harris employee, but the FAA facility was his permanent place of employment.

I go into a lot of high dollar facilities, I'll bet this is going to make it harder for me to access a lot of them. Ya know - just in case I might want to burn the place down or anything. I can see the hole in the security happening. I've been granted unescorted access to a lot of places that were pretty sensitive including several nuke reactors in the past.
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IMO, if the area is that sensitive there should be no one in there unescorted or alone, even FAA employees.
 
Turningfinal said:
IMO, if the area is that sensitive there should be no one in there unescorted or alone, even FAA employees.
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Can't disagree with that. Pretty sure that will be implemented now.

I was in a huge financial datacenter during trading hours, and not only did I have an escort, but I had a manager along watching the escort. Touching things during trading hours is risky business, and it had to be done. But - one missed entry on the keyboard and millions of bucks are at risk.

Then I recall going into Oak Ridge national labs, getting a film badge, dosimeter, and a little map legend on where the building was, and they just buzzed me through the door and pointed; 'that way'.
 
denverpilot said:
Farm it all out to LockMart, just like FSS. It'll be all run out of a handful of locations within a year.

(You decide if I'm serious or being sarcastic, I'm not saying. I bet both for and against arguments could easily be made. Doesn't matter anyway, to farm it out would require that a Senator's friend stands to make at least $100M so there's plenty of graft for the Senator.)
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Prelude to user fees :rolleyes:
 
Flew into KORD from the NW today. One could tell traffic was down. They have MPS Center expanded all the way to ORD Approach. There was no 'Chicago Center' to talk to. One could get the feeling ATC facilities were below optimum.

It won't help at this point, but I hope the 'fire bug' gets spanked hard for his actions.
 
I have been writing this since Friday when the outage began (it took that long for the SITREP Stan!). Things have been a tad busy here so I've been adding to this in bits and pieces in when I can.

I won't speak about the ZAU fire. All I can say to those who don't know how ATC works is that the NAS is a system designed with multiple layers of redundancy. This is the first time since 1962 that ZAU has not had at least one controller manning a frequency and keeping an eye on the skies over the region.

Let me say that again.

The FIRST time.

Since 1962. Every other outage, equipment failure, or hiccup ZAU suffered, traffic kept moving and controllers still worked airplanes through the system. Even years ago, when ZAU lost automation capability, we worked the traffic and got siht done. The average Joe didn't hear about those things in the news.

We (too many ATC facilities to list) are making things work right now, but have to manually coordinate all flight plan and aircraft information between facilities. Since Chicago TRACON doesn't abut the ARTCC's that have assumed ZAU airspace we did not have landlines with those sectors and controllers. Every coordination call required a regular landline telephone call (i.e. 123-456-7890) to affect flight plan forwarding and radar handoff coordination. Saturday, one of our technicians figured out how to get shout lines for us, which has been a considerable help in affecting coordination. Today we further streamlined how we affect manual coordination between neighboring facilities.

ZAU controllers have been helping at Chicago TRACON since Saturday. ZAU controllers are now enroute to all neighboring facilities to aide in coordination and manual flight plan processing.

We need the help. We are back to the 1950's-1960's. Back then, ATC needed two to three controllers per sector to work traffic through the NAS. Without automation, the amount of manpower required to work traffic into and out of these airports is staggering. Every single flight plan needs manual coordination: call sign, type aircraft, requested altitude, route of flight, beacon code, and any other pertinent information. Every aircraft requires inter facility coordination to affect a handoff: location, beacon code, altitude, call sign. I've never been more proud of my colleagues and the work done to get things moving like we have done. I can't begin to describe the amount of teamwork and fortitude my fellow controllers have exhibited thus far.

We are learning as we go and there are parts of ZAU airspace with zero radar coverage. It's not just Chicago TRACON that is dealing with the ZAU outage. Every facility in and around ZAU faces the same challenges. For those of you flying around ZAU and surrounding airspace I can only say one thing.

Please be patient.
 
denverpilot said:
Farm it all out to LockMart, just like FSS. It'll be all run out of a handful of locations within a year.
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If they handle it as well as they handled the FSS takeover (and that IS sarcasem), there are gonna be a lot of dead people and aluminum scattered about the landscape. I might need to move to Canada for a few years until they figure out WTF they're doing.
 
StinkBug said:
I dont doubt that you are correct, but I wonder if it might be feasible to add a couple extra seats at each of a bunch of local airports, that could be wired into the system such that in a case such as this the controllers could be sent to various existing ATC sites and keep things going at some functional level. Having entire ARTCC backup sites would be incredibly expensive and hard to justify, but having a little extra equipment in facilities that are already there might not be such a huge thing to do. Plus they could probably justify some of it as backup for the equipment in that facility as well.
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Sadly, the FAA is moving in the opposite direction, moving to more centralized locations. See Norcal and Socal TRACONs for example. The FAA has plans to move MSN TRACON in with MKE in the next few years, and I'd be surprised if they didn't get GRB in on the deal too. "Cheesehead approach" I suppose. I think I'd rather have the more local controllers...
 
That's OK so long as they also implement a Disaster Recovery plan.
 
fiftiesdean said:
A "few billion dollars" is an absurd amount of money, that seems way too high.
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True.

OTOH, if you threw in a new computer system with the deal, after the FAA got done with it a few billion would end up way too low.
 
StinkBug said:
More accurately, they expect us to thank them.
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Good point! Not only that, we are supposed to get out of their way on the road and stay out of their sky and god forbid we ever think about criticizing them...
 
Clark1961 said:
Good point! Not only that, we are supposed to get out of their way on the road and stay out of their sky and god forbid we ever think about criticizing them...
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Oh Geez..... Now they will track you with those pesky black helicopters..;)
 
FAA orders review in Chicago air traffic snarl

http://www.kansas.com/news/business/article2294043.html#/tabPane=tabs-f5c7dea6-1
"The Federal Aviation Administration is reviewing security practices and how it deals with unexpected incidents throughout its air traffic control facilities following last week's fire at a Chicago-area air traffic facility, agency administrator Michael Huerta said Monday."

No mention of implementing DR, though.
 
Total operations yesterday 9/30/2014
ORD 2472
ATL 2441

No automation, still the world's busiest!
 
AuntPeggy said:
http://www.kansas.com/news/business/article2294043.html#/tabPane=tabs-f5c7dea6-1

"The Federal Aviation Administration is reviewing security practices and how it deals with unexpected incidents throughout its air traffic control facilities following last week's fire at a Chicago-area air traffic facility, agency administrator Michael Huerta said Monday."



No mention of implementing DR, though.
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Standard press release.

Any time you see the head of an organization not change priorities and act immediately, and instead finds a press camera to babble to, you know it'll be many moons before they actually do stuff. I'm sure it'll get added to his list to whine to Congress about for more money next year, but he won't divert funding from anything else to accomplish anything.
 
Re: FAA orders review in Chicago air traffic snarl

AuntPeggy said:
http://www.kansas.com/news/business/article2294043.html#/tabPane=tabs-f5c7dea6-1
"The Federal Aviation Administration is reviewing security practices and how it deals with unexpected incidents throughout its air traffic control facilities following last week's fire at a Chicago-area air traffic facility, agency administrator Michael Huerta said Monday."

No mention of implementing DR, though.
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Wonder if Operation Raincheck will be terminated.
 
Re: FAA orders review in Chicago air traffic snarl

wsuffa said:
Wonder if Operation Raincheck will be terminated.
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The directives for Operation Raincheck and Operation Takeoff were both cancelled earlier this year. You can still visit FAA facilities though.
 
Things were still messy when I flew yesterday - Heard a Beechjet that went VFR in the teens to avoid delays wondering when he was going to be able to pick up IFR and get higher, and there were a ton of airliners and bizjets down around 15,000 feet as well. Quite a bit of confusion about who was going where as well.

However, they said they were expecting to have the computers back online Monday, and they just said on the news that the "Aurora Tower" :rolleyes: is opening again tomorrow.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
However, they said they were expecting to have the computers back online Monday, and they just said on the news that the "Aurora Tower" :rolleyes: is opening again tomorrow.
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Yeah, I just got an update from my ops that the FAA is still insisting on 100% by 10/13... I'm headed up to MI through ORD on Wednesday, so hopefully it's close. (Although, truth be told, I wouldn't complain about some in-air delays while I'm being paid block with a few laps in a hold for currency...)
 
Heard Marc Epner say this evening that he got a Tweet that the system test today went well, so they should be able to open tomorrow as planned.
 
Flew on Southwest MKE to LAS on Thursday and it was 13-14K for a while, talk about a bumpy ride!!
 
The ORD traffic is back to normal now. Up to yesterday, anyone going out of ORD climbing high went right to a surrounding ARTCC (ZMP, ZOB, ZKC, or ZID). Radar coverage did limit some low level ops, though.
 
Jmcmanna said:
The ORD traffic is back to normal now. Up to yesterday, anyone going out of ORD climbing high went right to a surrounding ARTCC (ZMP, ZOB, ZKC, or ZID). Radar coverage did limit some low level ops, though.
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So they'd be handed from C90 to another ARTCC?

Why were there so many that were down low so far out? Or were those all the ones that weren't from ORD?
 
AuntPeggy said:
That's OK so long as they also implement a Disaster Recovery plan.
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Truthfully, that is the first step toward DR (and what I advocated throughout this thread). Centralize then standardize. Then you can have redundancy. It is 2014. There is no reason to have local ARTCCs anymore.
 
SkyHog said:
Truthfully, that is the first step toward DR (and what I advocated throughout this thread). Centralize then standardize. Then you can have redundancy. It is 2014. There is no reason to have local ARTCCs anymore.
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Yeah, much better to put all of our eggs in one basket. There's no way this guy could've cut the wires to the entire nationwide ARTCC system if they were all located in one location!
 
Turningfinal said:
Yeah, much better to put all of our eggs in one basket. There's no way this guy could've cut the wires to the entire nationwide ARTCC system if they were all located in one location!
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If you had redundant locations, that wouldn't matter.
 
SkyHog said:
Truthfully, that is the first step toward DR (and what I advocated throughout this thread). Centralize then standardize. Then you can have redundancy. It is 2014. There is no reason to have local ARTCCs anymore.
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How do you propose we standardize? Do you dynamite the Rockies to form a universal MEA? Do we change naming conventions on airports so they are now Alpha Bravo Charlie etc based on counter clockwise from the sector center? Do we just roll with the same 50 fix names (ie Airport Bravo ILS IF is FIXER)? What is the standardized runway configuration for all airports in the US? What is the standard LOA that works for both Pudunk approach and NY approach? Which frequencies are standard (I get to hear the ATIS from an airport 500 miles away) without bleed over? Which sector size do we choose that works both at NYC and Western Montana?

Maybe you know something controllers don't and I'd welcome your input. Its like saying standardizing airplanes just in case. I recall a gentleman who hadn't flown more than a skylane landing a king air a few years back. To any pilot on this board, that was a HUGE DEAL and rightfully so. Airspace is airpace just like an airplane is an airplane.

Honestly though I see what you're getting at. Some emergency center with all the maps and feeds ready to go just in case. Here's how I see that playing out. "News at 6, the FAA spent a billion dollars on a vacant ATC facility and employs guards and maintainers and it hasn't been used in 30 years."
 
Jmcmanna said:
The ORD traffic is back to normal now. Up to yesterday, anyone going out of ORD climbing high went right to a surrounding ARTCC (ZMP, ZOB, ZKC, or ZID). Radar coverage did limit some low level ops, though.
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Approach_controller said:
How do you propose we standardize? Do you dynamite the Rockies to form a universal MEA? Do we change naming conventions on airports so they are now Alpha Bravo Charlie etc based on counter clockwise from the sector center? Do we just roll with the same 50 fix names (ie Airport Bravo ILS IF is FIXER)? What is the standardized runway configuration for all airports in the US? What is the standard LOA that works for both Pudunk approach and NY approach? Which frequencies are standard (I get to hear the ATIS from an airport 500 miles away) without bleed over? Which sector size do we choose that works both at NYC and Western Montana?



Maybe you know something controllers don't and I'd welcome your input. Its like saying standardizing airplanes just in case. I recall a gentleman who hadn't flown more than a skylane landing a king air a few years back. To any pilot on this board, that was a HUGE DEAL and rightfully so. Airspace is airpace just like an airplane is an airplane.



Honestly though I see what you're getting at. Some emergency center with all the maps and feeds ready to go just in case. Here's how I see that playing out. "News at 6, the FAA spent a billion dollars on a vacant ATC facility and employs guards and maintainers and it hasn't been used in 30 years."
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Huh. Look at that. A bunch of nearby Centers handling the traffic. Pure magic.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Any of the airline guys operating out of ORD - have you been provided with instructions on how to avoid ZAU?
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What or where is ZAU?

FWIW, on Sunday on my commute to work, the RJ I was on was at 10,000 feet from Kansas City to O'Hare.
 
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