Power Outage Causes Controllers' Angst?
I heard a blurb about this on the radio while driving home from work today and had to shake my head. Here is the story as reported by the San Jose Mercury News. In a nutshell, there was a problem with an underground cable feeding power to a TRACON near Miramar, CA that caused an interruption of electrical service. The FAA's backup generators kicked in immediately and there was no interruption of ATC services, but the control room was darkened for a few seconds.
The radio news was fairly accurate in reporting what the local head of the NATCA said about controllers having a moment of concern as the control room was plunged into darkness - including the scopes.
The radio report also said the radar outage lasted about seven seconds. This is the part that got me a bit tweaked. A typical radar sweep is 4.7 seconds. This outage lasted less than two sweeps of the radar and the reporter made it sound like a major problem.
Now, forgetting for the moment that controllers should have paper backups they can use in cases like this (as long as they have enough light to see them), this outage came nowhere close to causing any safety issues. I've talked to and read enough from controllers to know that any scenario where these seven seconds would have been a safety concern would have already been a problem.
I got to thinking this quote must have been put out by the NATCA as a means of embarrassing the FAA. Not that the FAA shouldn't have been embarrassed by this incident, though.
I find it a bit odd that all the scopes aren't on a true UPS backup - one where they're running from batteries all the time and the batteries are constantly recharged by the electrical grid or the generators in case the grid trips offline. This technique is nothing new. It's used in data centers around the world and I find it...well, disappointing that the facilities supporting the busiest airspace in the world don't use it.