August 28, 2009

Air traffic controllers at a major control center in California say they were reduced to using personal mobile phones to guide dozens of airplanes when the communications system briefly crashed.

The communications outage deprived about half of the roughly 80
controllers on duty at the Oakland Center in Fremont of telephone
and radio communications for several minutes Wednesday morning.

Controllers said they used personal mobile phones to contact other controllers to relay flight plan information to airplanes in Western region.

FAA says no planes were in danger during the 15-minute outage and five flights were delayed.