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Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed from Atlanta to Houston to Phoenix after the problem, traced to something as simple as a single circuit board, began about 5 a.m.
The glitch was fixed about four hours later, but scattered delays were reported throughout the day. Planes in the air were never in danger.
The snarl prompted calls for more money and personnel at the Federal Aviation Administration, which has struggled without success for years to overhaul the air-traffic system.
The circuit board at an FAA center in Salt Lake City is part of a multibillion-dollar nationwide communications network the agency has spent years installing as part of plans to modernize air-traffic control.
A government watchdog said last year the network was over budget and plagued by outages. On a single day in 2007, the failure of parts of the network was responsible for 566 flight delays.
Aviation experts are unsure whether any system that relies on the interconnectedness of computers can prevent glitches from causing havoc unless there are sufficient backup systems to handle the thousands of flight plans filed each day in the United States.
"A good communications system should have enough redundancy that a failure shouldn't hurt it that badly," said Michael Ball, a University of Maryland professor who specializes in aviation operations research.
Although yesterday's delays were not as bad as those caused by a major winter storm, passengers already frustrated by add-on fees for checking bags and the other hassles of everyday air travel were miffed.
Sisters Sharon Walker and Sheila James were taking their elderly mother, Rosa Washington, to see their other sister in St. Louis. Their 9:30 a.m. flight from Atlanta was delayed until 4 p.m.
Angelo Adams of Atlanta, waiting for a flight to Philadelphia, said: "I am sitting here at the airport for an additional three hours when I could have been sleeping in."
Some inbound flights at Philadelphia International Airport were delayed yesterday at their originating airports an average 2 hours, 29 minutes, but that was because of the weather, airport officials said. The FAA issued a ground delay for Philadelphia and many other airports along the East Coast because of the low cloud ceilings and restricted visibility, airport spokesman Victoria Lupica said.
Lawmakers in Washington pounced on the problem. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D., N.Y.) said that the country's aviation system was "in shambles" and that the FAA needed more resources to prevent similar problems.
Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D., N.D.), chairman of the Senate's aviation panel, said he planned to grill FAA administrator Randy Babbitt about the issue at a Dec. 10 hearing. And Rep. Jerry Costello (D., Ill.), chairman of the House aviation panel, asked the transportation inspector general to investigate and report to Congress within 60 days.
Airlines, reeling from the economic slowdown, were tallying their losses from the delays and cancellations. Several refused to estimate the cost.
It was just a year and three months ago that the FAA had to deal with a similar headache. In August 2008, a software malfunction delayed hundreds of flights around the country. In that episode, the Northeast was hit hardest by the delays, caused by a glitch at the Hampton, Ga., facility that processes flight plans for the Eastern United States.
FAA officials said yesterday's failure prevented air-traffic control computers in various regions from sending one another information about flights. The two large computer centers, in Salt Lake City and Hampton, an Atlanta suburb, were both affected, as were 21 regional radar centers around the country.
The problem began with the failure of a single small circuit board in a router. Air-traffic controllers were forced to type in complicated flight plans themselves because the data could not be transferred automatically from computers in one region to computers in another, slowing the whole system.
The equipment that failed was part of a telecommunications network owned and operated by FAA contractor Harris Corp. of Melbourne, Fla. The FAA is investigating the failure, spokeswoman Laura Brown said. Harris said it was working with the FAA to resolve the issue.
Tom Brantley, national president of Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, said Harris initially tried to troubleshoot the problem via long distance without sending a technician to the FAA center in Salt Lake City.
When that didn't work, a technician was dispatched, Brantley said, but the delay extended the outage.
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