Cell Phones to the Rescue After Memphis Radar Snafu

Travel Blog • Terry Ward • 09.26.07 | 2:15 PM ET

We may not be allowed to use our cell phones in flight yet, but personal phones certainly came in handy during a harrowing air traffic control crisis in Memphis yesterday. CNN reports that air traffic controllers were forced to use their cell phones to reroute hundreds of flights when the local FAA center in Memphis lost radar and phone service for more than two hours.

Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, calling a spade a spade, labeled the failure “a major safety problem.” From the CNN story:

At the time of the outage, controllers “were thrust into an immensely chaotic situation in which they had to use personal cell phones to talk to other air traffic control facilities about specific flights that they could not communicate with themselves,” he (Church) said.

As flights were re-routed and canceled, significant delays ensued at some of the country’s busiest airports, including Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta and Charlotte.

As for those passengers who were essentially blasting through the skies aboard ghost ships during the communication loss (at least for those travelers flying on planes without modern entertainment systems capable of broadcasting breaking news), well, they never saw it coming—after all, it’s not as if they could receive an incoming call.