Contact Lost With Planes One by One as FAA Fire Spread
October 3rd, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
The first radio links with pilots were lost just as the pre-dawn crush of flights into Chicago began.
Air-traffic controllers in a nondescript Federal Aviation Administration building about 40 miles from the city switched to backup channels. Then those failed. They tried emergency connections, which also went dead.
Within minutes, radar feeds, flight plans and other data controllers rely on to direct more than 6,000 aircraft a day above five U.S. states had vanished as a fire was being set in a communications room one floor below. The attack was thorough and carried out by someone who knew the system intimately — down to removing steel sheathing on data cables to destroy them, according to three people with knowledge of the incident.
Thank you for this article Kevin. Yea verily, I was supposed to fly to Midway on the 26th and was saved from checking my bag onto Southwest at the last second. Got a ride and back to Michigan from a cousin to our all girl cousin weekend 8 months in the planning. I have been trying to recover from sitting in a car all of that time ever since. Nonetheless, I thought at the time it was 9/11 all over again. The melee of confusion was incredible. That one person can bring down the entire airspace is something to ponder on. Was thinking that we should name this day after the dude who brought the world airspace down for a day. He will live in infamy.