Power Outage ATL Ground Stop
 

There are no small SNAFUs at the KATL !! Yet another great day to NOT be there. :D

https://flightaware.com/miserymap/

...offffff the charts... :p

International arrivals destined for ATL are diverting wherever they can. At 23:55 Z Turkish 31K from IST on approach to Dulles - Delta 26 from ICN appears to be descending for Detroit etc...

Apparently the second time this week, last was due weather, this due a power problem.

Latest Georgia Power blurb...

Seems strange that an airport emergency power back-up system was unable to cope...one imagines that every major airport has some form of standby power that operates outside the mains system. There is a form of aux power but seems to be just for peak demands times.
http://www.ecmweb.com/content/multip...rgency-systems

This outage seems to have been confined to the airport so the reported fire to an underground facility seems to have effected both mains and emergency power distribution.

Emergency power was restored but not all power. Georgia Power spokesman John Kraft said the utility was working to find out the cause of the outage and restore electricity. He could not estimate when that might happen. Spokeswoman Holly Crawford said no areas outside of the airport were affected by the power cut.

Emergency power operates essential items, not the subway, the doors, the jetways, etc. there’s no way emergency generators could power the entire airport.

Airports typically have fast transfer backup generation for all safety-critical functions - ATC facilities, runway lighting, navaids etc. Terminal facilities may not be on that system - especially a terminal complex as large as Atlanta, which probably draws an extremely large amount of power from the grid under normal circumstances. Fire codes would require the buildings to be equipped with emergency lighting, but that is probably all the backup that exists in the terminals.

No doubt the several ILS systems went to standby power. Probably the tower as well. Beyond that there is not sufficient backup power for the computer systems for Delta and the Custom services.

Sad, if the local power company did it all in through carelessness.

So in a situation like this, tens of thousands of people have their travel plans trashed, unable to get luggage, use bathrooms which have electronic flushes, likely not able to get much good phone or internet service, needing hotel rooms, rental cars, access to medicine etc etc


WHO PAYS?? (Serious question)

finfly1 I don't know who pays but I know who will be paid. Lawyers. It really will be christmas for them.

Why does someone have pay? Stuff happens, we all pay.

BTW, the airport is open for cargo and private flights going to Signature

Here's an example of what a good media relations team does for you at times of bad news. From the BBC :

"A number of major airlines, including United, Southwest and American Airlines, completely suspended their operations on Sunday."

Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airport power cut strands thousands - BBC News


Not a word about Delta in the entire article.

You are right - this is not a 'snafu' this is a really major engineering design failure. There was obviously a single point of failure for the entire Atlanta airport complex this is a fundamental of system design. From reports there was a fire in an 'underground Georgia Power facility' at the airport that had to be extinguished then Georgia Power staff get in there to repair the equipment before power was restored. It appears that the one facility was the switch gear between power possibly standby power and grid power (possibly more than one grid). As it was Sunday I would surmise that a 'routine' maintenance or swap over of power supplies went wrong. Leading to an electrical fire.

It is unforgivable for each concourse not to have individual back up power, the 'plane train' to have its own back up power each runway lighting set could have backup power and each ground facility such as ILS localizer/glidepath etc. The backup power for the concourses should be enough to run sufficient emergency lights and systems to run the operation normally but perhaps with the loss of heavy non-essential drains like kitchen power to restaurants. This is undergraduate level engineering for a major airport.

This is not something that happened last Sunday; it is a failure that has been waiting to happen for years. Delta as the main operator should request (demand?) a full audit of all essential systems to ensure that there are no other 'single points of failure'. You would have thought that Delta would have learned a lesson from their systems going down due to a similar single point of failure in power supply to primary and backup computer systems.

Unless we're not being told everything and this was a deliberate act.

Certainly as Delta’s main hub they will probably suffer the most. My son, a Delta employee was trying to get back to SLA and unable due this event.

I don't know, Finfly, who paid for the damage to that cemetery?

You will find that Delta have likely been banging on to this (and other) airport operators for years. Unfortunately such conversations are pretty much exclusively about reducing charges. You can find exactly this process going on at London Heathrow at present, where it has been recently announced that a revision to the new runway/terminal plans has saved GBP 2bn. Guess what contributes to such cost reductions. Reduction of redundancy and resilience of course.

It's not even as if this is deliberately done. The electrical installation is offered to the large specialists that do this work as 'Design & Build'. And the bottom bidder gets the job. You try selling resilience to a client strapped for budget.

The party responsible for the accident paid the cemetery.

And also paid the pilot.

Over thirty years ago.