{{A common design problem in the U.S. air traffic control system made it possible for a U-2 spy plane to spark a computer glitch that recently grounded or delayed hundreds of Los Angeles area flights, according to an inside account and security experts.}}
In theory, the same vulnerability could have been used by an attacker in a deliberate shut-down, the experts said, though two people familiar with the incident said it would be difficult to replicate the exact conditions.
The error blanked out a broad swath of the southwestern United States, from the West Coast to western Arizona and from southern Nevada to the Mexico border.
As aircraft flew through the region, the $2.4 billion system made by Lockheed Martin Corp, cycled off and on trying to fix the error, triggered by a lack of altitude information in the U-2’s flight plan, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the incident.
No accidents or injuries were reported from the April 30 failure, though numerous flights were delayed or canceled.
Lockheed Martin said it conducts “robust testing” on all its systems and referred further questions about the En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) system to the Federal Aviation Administration.
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the computer had to examine a large number of air routes to “de-conflict the aircraft with lower-altitude flights”.
She said that process “used a large amount of available memory and interrupted the computer’s other flight-processing functions”.
The FAA later set the system to require altitudes for every flight plan and added memory to the system, which should prevent such problems in the future, Brown said.
wirestory
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