Computers snarl U.S. air traffic

In a software nightmare this week, a breakdown in the Federal Aviation Administration's system for processing flight plans caused massive airline delays. The FAA said a software problem  caused the system to go down at about 1 p.m. EDT on Tuesday. A backup system in Salt Lake City took over flight-plan processing, but a backlog in the handover caused the flight delays.

Central to the problem was the FAA's computer system known as the National Data Interchange Network, which processes the flight plans that airlines file every day. "This was a failure mode we've not seen before," said Hank Krakowski, chief operating officer of the FAA's Air Traffic Organization. "It looks like an internal software processing error. We think we know what it is, but we have to do forensics on it to figure it out."

For more on the FAA:
- see this cnet.com article