Denver airport’s air traffic control was reportedly struck by a staggering six-minute outage earlier this week after several radio transmitters suddenly went dark.
The frequency outage meant that as many as 20 pilots were unable to reach air traffic controllers as they descended into Denver International Airport on Monday afternoon, ABC7 reported, citing sources.
A controller eventually made contact with one aircraft on a “guard line,” which is typically only used when a pilot is in distress.
That pilot was then able to contact other nearby planes and tell them to switch radio frequencies, the sources said.
At the time of the ordeal, controllers at the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center were already communicating on a backup frequency after four other frequencies went out of service, according to the one source.
“It’s one thing to lose track of one airplane because you can’t communicate with them, but to lose track of all of the airplanes that you had communication with,” David Riley, a retired air traffic controller, said.
“And from my understanding, in this situation, they still had radar coverage, but that’s like watching a car crash happen and not be able to do anything about it.”
The Denver mishap is just the latest in a spate of air traffic control issues — including repeated outages at the troubled Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey that have sparked mass cancellations.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy last week unveiled plans to revamp the nation’s plagued air travel system, detailing a multi-billion-dollar overhaul to replace the nation’s aging air traffic control system.
The Transportation Department plans to ask Congress for billions and billions of dollars to replace 618 radars, install 4,600 new high-speed connections and upgrade all the computers controllers use.
Still, Federal Aviation Administration officials told a congressional hearing Wednesday that it would take another year or more to update aging infrastructure and complete recruitment for controllers.
The FAA is still short roughly 3,000 air traffic controllers and in the process of updating copper telecommunications wires for a brand-new fiber-optic network.
Air Traffic Organization deputy COO Franklin McIntosh revealed the agency is only on track to hire 2,000 air traffic controllers by the end of this year.
“We have to account for attrition,” McIntosh said.
“I think we’ll finally start gaining traction this year, where we outpace attrition. And then we’ll start seeing over the next 18 to 24 months where we actually see a positive gain in the controllers.”
