{{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.}}<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
No accidents or injuries were reported from the April 30 failure, though numerous flights were delayed or canceled.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
She said that process “used a large amount of available memory and interrupted the computer’s other flight-processing functions”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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