The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), admitted to a communications outage that briefly affected part of an air traffic control center at Colorado’s Denver International Airport on Monday. The incident, which lasted about 90 seconds, impacted a facility responsible for overseeing flights across a large portion of the western United States, the agency confirmed on Thursday.
Denver7, an ABC affiliate, was the first to report the disruption. The station said that approximately 20 pilots en route to Denver International Airport experienced a six-minute window during which they were unable to establish contact with air traffic controllers on Monday afternoon.
Denver 7 reports that on Thursday morning during a hearing for the House Committee on Transportation, Deputy Chief Operating Officer Frank McIntosh of the Air Traffic Organization was pressed on the issue by U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia, asking “if that reporting is actually accurate.”
McIntosh responded by saying in-part, “Some of it, we feel, is accurate, but I don’t think the severity of it was captured correctly.” McIntosh revealed there was a loss of one of the frequencies, and controllers utilized a backup frequency, which then failed as well.
“When the backup went down — and it went down for approximately two minutes — the controller recovered via the emergency procedures that they have,” McIntosh said.
Despite the communications lapse, operations at Denver International Airport—the state’s busiest airport—remained largely unaffected. Data from FlightAware, a flight tracking service, showed that only two flights were canceled and fewer than 300 were delayed that day. United Airlines, which handles about 38% of the airport’s flights, reported no operational disruptions due to the outage. In a statement, United said the outage did not disrupt its operations.
The incident in Colorado came shortly after a separate air traffic control facility in Philadelphia experienced two radar outages in recent weeks. Those outages prevented communication with aircraft traveling to or from Newark Liberty International Airport.
The Colorado disruption occurred at approximately 1:50 p.m. when two transmitters covering a segment of the airspace failed. “Controllers used another frequency to relay instructions to pilots,” the FAA stated. “Aircraft remained safely separated and there were no impacts to operations. The F.A.A. is investigating.”
Unlike the Philadelphia site, which primarily manages planes during takeoff and landing at Newark, the Colorado facility directs aircraft already in flight. These planes typically cruise at higher altitudes, are more spread out, and fly at consistent speeds. The FAA operates around two dozen such centers across the U.S., each responsible for more than 100,000 square miles of airspace, according to The New York Times.