SUBURBAN WEST PALM BEACH, FL -- There are worse places to be stranded than sunny South Florida, but for a group of co-workers here on business, hanging out for several hours at Palm Beach International Airport hardly qualified as a day at the beach.
Their flight to Newark Airport had been delayed by a nationwide computer glitch.
"All computer problems bother me," said Anne McElroy. She and her husband Griff were on the same flight to Newark, one of a handful affected at PBIA by the system-wide slow-down.
Two JetBlue flights, one to Boston, the other also to Newark were among those delayed as well. "They have the upper hand," said Griff McElroy. "We don't."
The culprit is a computer system called NADIS which allows pilots to file their flight plans electronically. Without it, those plans have to be filed manually. That takes time, creating long lines at big airports and a ripple effect at smaller ones too.
"The radar is working fine. The centers that talk to each other to control traffic are doing fine. This is simply a ground component of filing those flight plans and getting those flight plans to the system," said WPTV aviation expert Dave Bjellos.
By 10:15 a.m. the FAA announced the computer system was up and running again, but the damage was already done. It would take hours to work the back-ups through the system.
"Not the end of the world", said passenger Marilyn Miltz from Delray Beach, trying to keep things in perspective. "As long as I'm safe," she said. "I have all the time in the world - I'm retired - to get there."
Bjellos says the issue had nothing to do with a hacker or cyber-terrorism. It has to do with the 'HOST' system, he says. It's an antiquated system, says Bjellos from the 1950s still used today.
A new system called NEXGEN is slowly being implemented, he says, but won't be fully in place until the year 2020.
Until then, Bjellos says this wasn't the first, and it won't be the last of these sorts of problems.
