LAX landing system problem causes flight delays

Early on Tuesday morning the rate of flights coming in to the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) fell from 68 to 32 per hour, which led to delays that averaged nearly 40 minutes.

The instrument landing system at the airport failed during a period of heavy fog, delaying inbound flights by up to 90 minutes, and reducing the number of landings per hour by approximately 50 percent, according to authorities at the airport.

This latest equipment outage is the ninth failure of radar and audio in southern California air traffic control facilities since February of this year – the highest in the nation, according to official reports.

Airplanes are guided during poor visibility conditions by sound waves transmitted by instrument landing systems. Heavy fog hugged the coast on Monday morning, severely reducing visibility at LAX.

A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokesman, Ian Gregor, said that the northern runways instrument landing system started experiencing radio signal problems at around 3:00am.

Air traffic control was forced to shift landings to the airport’s southern side at about 6:00am, and to stop departures of flights that were bound for LAX from airports within an hour’s flight time of Los Angeles – such as Las Vegas, Oakland, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Francisco.

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