On one of the busiest travel days, FAA’s Flight Delay Information site is down. FAA's delay tracker takes a dive

On one of the busiest travel days of the year, the FAA’s flight delay tracking website hit some turbulence.

On Wednesday morning, visitors to the FAA's Flight Delay Information site were greeted with this message: “We're sorry. You have reached this page because the site is currently down. Please check back soon, as we are currently working to get the issue resolved.”


( Also on POLITICO: Battle of the blogs: TSA vs. syndicated columnist)

After being down for several hours, the website was back online at about 2 p.m. Wednesday.

The tech snafu, though ill-timed as travelers crisscross the country for Thanksgiving, appeared isolated to a problem with FAA’s website and was not affecting actual air traffic control.

During the outage, an FAA official recommended travelers headed to clogged airports to check in with their airlines or local airports for flight delay and cancellation specifics. The FAA also posts ground delays and stops on the FAA’s Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Chris Oswald, vice president of safety and technical operations for Airports Council International-North America, said the FAA’s delay map site “is not generally used for minute-to-minute airport operational decisions, but instead is of greater use to the public at large in seeing at a glance where delays are occurring.”

Oswald added he doubts the outage caused much confusion for passengers and noted that his group and many of its airport members typically advise passengers to contact airlines directly ahead of their flights. It’s “always good advice regardless of what the map on fly.faa.gov is showing,” Oswald said.

While the FAA’s site is the top Internet search result for “flight delays,” there are other websites that track the delays travelers can turn to during the holiday rush, including FlightStats and FlightAware. Both sites showed relatively little gridlock in the nation’s aviation system midday Wednesday, save for the crowded airspace over Chicago. The FAA said heavy fog and low visibility were the cause of those problems.

Additionally, so far no major airline mishaps have been reported.

According to The Associated Press, firefighters Wednesday had to extinguish a small engine fire on a JetBlue regional jet landing at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, but no one was hurt and no other flights were affected.

Kathryn A. Wolfe contributed to this story.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 1:10 p.m. on November 21, 2012.

This article tagged under: Airlines

FAA