An air traffic control center serving Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport was closed for several hours on Wednesday for cleaning after an employee tested positive for the coronavirus, interrupting flights at one of the busiest centers in the world.
The downtown outage – which deals with high-altitude air traffic to most of northern Texas, northwest Louisiana, eastern New Mexico and southern parts of Oklahoma and Arkansas – caused delays and diverted flights across the country.
The Fort Worth Airway Traffic Control Center suspended operations from 3:00 pm to 5:30 pm so that the facility could be disinfected, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which said on Wednesday night that a unique confluence of events and bad weather led to the disruption.
The FAA said the employee had worked at the center for the last time on Christmas Day, which was within a seven-day window that required a deeper level of cleanliness in the areas where the employee could be.
“As cleaning required the controllers to temporarily leave the control room, the FAA declared a ground stop, which stopped traffic at the boarding facilities,” the agency said on its Facebook page. He said other FAA facilities supported the closure and worked on traffic around the affected airspace.
Positive cases have been reported 22 times in the center, according to an FAA website. It was not immediately clear if there had been previous closures at the facility, that an FAA training manual claims to be responsible for 140,000 square nautical miles of airspace.
Both Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field reported substantial disruptions to their operations.
“The FAA closed the airspace in and out of DFW airport until 5 pm Central Time,” Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport said in a statement. “This is due to a necessary sanitizing of the FAA’s external facilities that control airspace in DFW. This will result in delays or possibly cancellation of flights. “
The airport, which served about 75 million passengers last year before the pandemic, asked travelers to check with their airline about changes in their flights.
A spokesman for Love Field, which is operated by the city of Dallas, said departures and arrivals were temporarily interrupted at the airport.
“The estimate we received for returning to normal operations was 1 to 2 hours and that was about an hour ago,” said spokesman Chris Perry in an email at around 4:45 pm local time.
About an hour later, an FAA spokesman said a ground stop was suspended. She also noted that flights that passed through the airspace served by the control center continued to operate and were able to communicate with other control centers. The spokeswoman said air traffic could still be affected by the weather in the area, where there were storms on Wednesday night.
“The FAA takes the safety of its employees and the flying public very seriously,” the agency said on its Facebook page. “Note that throughout this event, pilots have always been in contact with air traffic control officials, whether at the Fort Worth Air Traffic Control Center or other air traffic control facilities.”
Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport is a hub for American Airlines, which has received a flood of social media messages from travelers expressing their frustrations. An airline spokesman said nearly 60 flights were diverted.
“Our teams across the system continue to work to care for the affected customers and we apologize for the inconvenience,” said the spokesman.
Isaak Thurber said his flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport was affected by the ground stop.
“In the middle of my flight, the pilot comes to the intercom to tell us that DFW airspace has been closed due to ‘ambition issues’ and that we don’t know what to do,” Mr. Thurber said on Twitter. “Now, we land in Oklahoma City. I have to love 2020. ”