LOS ANGELES — Radio failure at a Federal Aviation Administration control facility forced some airports in the West to hold flights on the ground Tuesday, authorities said.
The outage occurred at 4:40 p.m. PDT at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, in the desert north of Los Angeles, which controls airspace in the Los Angeles region, northern California and parts of Nevada, said FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown.
At Salt Lake City International Airport, more than 15 flights were affected but were scheduled to start leaving about 10 p.m.
"We had maybe 10 that were grounded here and had only about seven that were diverted here," said Pat Hawley, airport duty manager.
The flights affected were to and from airports in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego and other places in Southern California, Hawley said.
The cause of the radio failure has not been determined, but authorities were scrambling to identify and fix the problem, Brown said.
Brown said planes were grounded at airports in the Los Angeles region, including those in Orange and San Diego counties, as well as in Las Vegas. "They can't take off and anything coming in has been grounded," Brown said.
Control of the airspace was turned over to other air traffic control facilities.
All flights at San Francisco International Airport destined for Southern California were grounded, said airport spokesman Mike McCarron.
The airport's duty manager, Dennis Neves, said the airport had taken three diversion flights Monday evening that were headed for Southern California.
One was a Virgin airlines flight from London. Another was a Seattle flight that was scheduled to land in Orange County but was sitting on the runway at SFO instead. A Northwest cargo flight from Anchorage, Alaska, also was instructed to land at SFO.
"He was running low on fuel," Neves said.
At the time of the outage, air traffic controllers could monitor the planes on radar but were not able to communicate with them, Brown said.
Pilots were forced to switch to a different radio frequency to communicate with other control facilities, she said.
"We want to stress there are no safety issues, just delays because control over the air space has been turned over to other air traffic facilities," said Gaby Pacheco, spokeswoman for Los Angeles International Airport.
Contributing: Laura Hancock, Deseret Morning News