Technology problems hit the commercial aviation industry hard over the weekend, leading to hundreds of cancelled flights and myriad delays on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Europe, the source of the problem is a company called Collins Aerospace that makes a product called ARINC cMUSE that it describes as a “next-generation common-use passenger processing system solution that allows multiple airlines to share check-in desks and boarding gate positions at an airport rather than having their own dedicated infrastructure.”
Maybe it does that when it’s working, but according to Brussels Airport, Collins Aerospace experienced “a cyberattack” that means passengers should expect delays and flight cancellations.
Collins Aviation told Reuters that it suffered a “cyber-related disruption” that means electronic customer check-in and baggage drop isn’t working, but that manual check-in operations remain possible.
London’s Heathrow Airport first mentioned the problem on Friday, and late on Sunday night advised “Work continues to resolve and recover from the outage of a Collins Aerospace airline system that impacted check-in. We apologise to those who have faced delays, but by working together with airlines, the vast majority of flights have continued to operate.”
At the time of publication, Collins Aerospace had no comment.
Dallas delays
While airlines in Europe reverted to manual processes, services in the US experienced disruptions after something severed a pair of fiber optic cables at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) on Friday.
A Saturday Xeet from the Federal Aviation Administration said “Yesterday’s disruption was caused by multiple failures of the TDM data telecommunications service provided by Frontier – a local telecommunications company. This then led to an outage impacting the FAA’s Dallas TRACON facility.”
TRACON stands for Terminal Radar Approach Control, a key part of the USA’s air traffic control system. The regulator also blamed L3Harris, one of its contractors, and said it “failed to ensure that redundancies in the system functioned properly.”
David Seymour, CEO of American Airlines (AA), offered more detail.
“Those cut cables impacted the primary and secondary paths of data, which support all of the area’s FAA radars, radio frequencies and computer systems,” he wrote. “For American and other operators at DFW, that meant the FAA was unable to release flights in an automated fashion, significantly limiting our ability to depart flights from DFW.”
Seymour says the FAA developed a workaround that allowed airlines “to release flights from the gate,” but said those processes “were extremely slow” and “simply couldn’t keep up” with AA’s flight schedule.
“To put American’s impact in context, between 3:00 PM and 6:00 PM CT yesterday, we could only depart a total of nine aircraft from DFW. That number is usually around 100 per hour.” The airline cancelled almost 700 flights, and diverted 65 – many of which spent a night at an airport other than DFW.
DFW operations are normal at the time of writing, after the airport, Frontier, and L3Harris hustled to find a fix. The FAA described the incident as a “clear example of the FAA’s outdated infrastructure and underscores the urgent need to modernize our air traffic control systems.”
“It also highlights the critical importance of clearing thousands of state and local permitting obstacles, which will delay modernization efforts by years. Moving from aging, analog systems to more resilient, digital technology, is critical to maintaining the reliability and resiliency of the national airspace system.” ®