A U-2 spy plane triggered a software glitch last Wednesday at a California air traffic control center that led to hundreds of flights being grounded at several airports across the United States.
On Wednesday at about 2 p.m., a U-2 spy plane passed through the airspace monitored by the L.A. Air Route Traffic Control Center, NBC News reported.
The plane's altitude and complicated route reportedly overloaded the L.A. centre computer system, causing the computers to shut down for around an hour, CNN reported.
Back-up computer systems also failed. As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an hour-long nationwide ground stop for aircraft traveling into the LA center's airspace.
The mass aircraft grounding caused flight cancellations and delays and affected thousands of passengers.
According to CNN, two FAA officials blamed the shutdown on the unlikely convergence of two events.
First, a U-2 aircraft flew a path that involved numerous waypoints and altitude changes in airspace controlled by three facilities, the Los Angeles and Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Centers and the High Desert TRACON at Edwards Air Force Base. At the same time, according to the officials, there was an outage of the Federal Telecommunications Infrastructure, a primary conduit of information among FAA facilities.
"That (U-2) flight plan, coupled with the FTI outage, in essence created a perfect storm," one official was quoted by CNN as saying.
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