One Manhattan power room took down FAA air traffic control in 1991
In 1991, a single power room failure at 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan caused a massive disruption to FAA air traffic control systems across the Northeast. The outage occurred because a backup battery system failed during a routine power transfer, leading to hundreds of flight cancellations.
Why it matters
This historical event highlights the critical vulnerability of centralized infrastructure and the importance of engineering safety standards in aviation systems.
At 4:40 p.m. on Tuesday, September 17, 1991, during the late-afternoon arrival rush across the Northeast, air traffic controllers at New York's regional radar center and the towers at Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark lost their radar feeds, primary radios, and automated flight-handoff links at the same moment. 1 2 3 With planes approaching all three airports, controllers had to guide commercial jets on short-range backup frequencies and manual tower-to-tower relays while the FAA halted airport traffic and 1,174 flights were canceled or delayed . 2 3 4 Nothing had failed at the airports; instead, every primary and backup FAA landline for the New York metropolitan area ran through transmission bays powered by the 20th-floor DC power room of 33 Thomas Street, a 29-story windowless granite AT&T switching hub in Lower Manhattan.
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