JFK Airport Hit With Power Outage — Affecting International Flights

Topline

A power outage at an international terminal at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport has temporarily halted flights going inbound and outbound, the airport announced on Twitter Thursday afternoon.

Key Facts

An overnight fire, which has since been extinguished, and an electrical panel failure caused the power outage, according to JFK’s Twitter account.

It’s unclear exactly how many flights are affected by the outage, but FlightAware reports 126 delays 25 cancellations at JFK on Thursday.

A number of flights set to land at JFK were diverted to other airports in Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C., according to the airport’s website.

JFK said they are working to use other terminals to accommodate flights impacted by the outage.

Key Background

The power outage comes after a series of airline snafus in the past few months. On Wednesday, the German airline Lufthansa suffered a computer outage forcing delayed and canceled flights. That issue was caused by damage to the fiber-optic cables during construction work in Frankfurt. Operations later returned to normal, the airline announced. During the week of Christmas Southwest suffered a major meltdown when winter storms collided with outdated systems and caused thousands of flight disruptions across the country. It took days for the airline’s operations to return to normal. The Department of Transportation is currently investigating whether Southwest executives broke federal law when they knowingly offered unrealistic scheduling options during the holiday season.

Tangnet

Last month a Federal Aviation Administration system outage affected more than 12,000 domestic flights, leading to nation-wide delays and cancellations. The FAA later said its Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system—which relays vital information to pilots and flight personnel about potential hazards—failed. On Wednesday, Bill Nolen, the acting administrator of the FAA, testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, And Transportation that preliminary findings in the investigation into the incident found no evidence of malicious intent or cyber-attack. Nolen said a contract personnel unintentionally deleted files while correcting synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database. As a result of the system outage, Nolen said the FAA has implemented a synchronization delay to ensure bad data in one database cannot affect a backup database. There will also be a new protocol requiring more than one individual be “present and engaged in oversight” when work on the database happens, Nolen said.

Big Number

33,959. That’s how many flights passed through JFK airport, according to data collected by the airport.

Further Reading

Power Outage Impacting New York’s JFK Airport Terminal 1 (CNN)

FAA ‘Back To Normal” After System Outage, Though More Flights Face Delays (Forbes)