Chicago Tribune: FAA Chief: No quick solutions after radar facility fire
The following article appeared in the Chicago Tribune on October 3, 2014. A link to the article can be found here.
By Jon Hilkevitch
The leader of the nation's civilian aviation system offered no quick solutions Friday to averting the kind of air-travel chaos that has occurred after an insider attack against an air-traffic control facility in Aurora late last month.
FAA Administrator Michael Huerta flew in from Washington to observe progress in rebuilding the fire-ravaged communications room at the Chicago Center. He was accompanied by several members of the Illinois congressional delegation.
Huerta said all the new equipment that is needed to reopen the facility by Oct.13 is now in the building and that "everyone is working very hard."
But Huerta said the FAA has no capability currently to prevent a future meltdown of airline service during interruptions in FAA air-traffic services.
He said the situation will not change until the FAA's long-term air-traffic modernization program, known as NextGen, comes on line in phases over roughly the next decade.
"The current backup plan for the agency is to get everyone on the ground safe," Huerta said at a news conference on Chicago Center grounds. "It has never been that every airline would run 100 percent of their operation within five minutes of a catastrophic event."
Sen. Dick Durbin called the extent of damage from the Sept. 26 fire "a stunning visual image." He described how the contract employee who now faces federal charges lifted tiles off the floor in order to cut cables to data and radio equipment.
Sen. Mark Kirk said the scene "looked like after the Apollo fire," a reference to the 1967 NASA disaster during a launch practice test for the first manned mission of the lunar landing program.
U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, a Democrat whose district includes O'Hare, said he asked a senior FAA official why no contingency planning had been done to respond to emergency scenarios involving the loss of air-traffic control centers.
"Three times I asked the question, ‘How come post-9/11 there wasn't a contingency plan immediately put in place?' He said three times, ‘That's a good question. We're analyzing that and hope to solve that as a problem.' That's about all. Clearly this was a slightly unusual circumstance in their mind and they didn't expect this kind of action.''
Quigley, who was not at the facility, said he will be "watching and pushing for implementation of a fail-safe fallback plan.''
"So far, honestly, the FAA doesn't have a great answer as to why there was no fail-safe fallback plan in place,'' Quigley said. "They made it clear that was a priority going forward. That's good to hear, but it's extraordinarily disappointing that it is taking place after the fact. In a post-9/11 world, that is just not acceptable.''