HERNDON, Virginia -- The giant U.S. aviation system survived its "witching hour" Friday by crossing midnight Greenwich Mean Time without significant disruption from the Year 2000 computer problem, U.S. government officials said.
Federal Aviation Administration chief Jane Garvey, aloft on a commercial flight to Dallas at the time, sent a message to President Bill Clinton that borrowed the words of pioneer flyers Orville and Wilbur Wright nearly 100 years ago.
"Success (stop)...Inform press (stop)," Garvey said in a message faxed to Clinton by FAA's operations centre as aviation entered the year 2000.
Garvey also spoke by conference call with Clinton's Y2K trouble-shooter John Koskinen -- who was aboard a commercial flight to New York -- and Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater -- at the FAA air traffic control command centre in the Washington suburb of Herndon, Va.
An airline industry spokesman said there were 1,335 commercial flights in the air at the rollover.
The air-traffic control systems are set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), also known as Universal Coordinated Time. "7 p.m. (EST) is really our midnight, our witching hour," Garvey had said leaving Washington.
FAA was investigating a brief outage of printers at its three oceanic control centres around the midnight GMT hour as a possible Y2K problem. FAA Deputy Administrator Monte Belger said the loss of the service provided by contractor ARINC had no operational impact as contact was maintained by telephone.
A report that runway lights blacked out at an airport in Lake Charles, La., around the crucial time change, was traced to the crash of a taxi into a power pole, an FAA spokesman said.
Garvey had boarded American Airlines Flight 1099 from Washington's Reagan National Airport bound for Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport to demonstrate her confidence in the system. She later plans to board a second flight bound for San Francisco.
Accompanying Garvey was Washington Republican Sen. Slade Gorton, chairman of the Senate's aviation subcommittee, who predicted that within 24 hours the public would understand that aviation remained the safest form of travel.
In any case, the FAA's task on New Year's Eve was made easier by sharply reduced airline schedules. The 1,335 commercial flights during the air traffic control rollover compared to 3,100 commercial flights at the same time a year ago.
Many airports in the hours leading up to the air-traffic control rollover were eerily quiet. At Washington's Reagan National, visitors had a rare choice of parking spots right near the terminal entrances and individual footsteps could be heard echoing in the vaulted main terminal building.
Before the night is out, four further midnights were to fall across time zones in the lower 48 states, possibly challenging internal airline systems and airport computers.
Even so, Air Transport Association President Carol Hallett declared victory over the Year 2000 problem on behalf of the nation's major airlines, saying the big carriers also used GMT to coordinate their operations.
"We have already celebrated the Year 2000 as far as aviation is concerned without a single glitch," Hallett said in an interview.
Older computers and their software often allocated only two digits to the year in dates, creating the potential for systems to read the year 2000 as 1900 and malfunction.
The FAA, aircraft manufacturers and airlines had all predicted smooth flying into 2000 after making a massive effort to ensure that date-sensitive systems have been repaired or replaced.
The 10 biggest U.S. airlines, which carry 95 percent of scheduled traffic, spent $650 million on Y2K work, according to filings with regulators. The FAA said earlier in December that it had spent $368 million on its systems.
But computer experts have warned against complacency and cautioned that problems may accumulate over the next few weeks.
The FAA on Thursday acknowledged that it had made a last-minute upgrade to some air-traffic control computers to head off a possible Y2K glitch that could have caused controllers' screens to show aircraft positions up to 10 seconds late if two related systems failed during the transition from 1999 to 2000.
Belger said FAA staff had reported other small problems in support equipment. "We are analysing all those right now to see if they were Y2K-related or kind of the normal operational difficulties that we sometimes see every day in a system that has over 44,000 pieces of equipment," he said.
The FAA has said that even if it does encounter some Y2K difficulties, it is prepared with contingency plans like those it uses during radar outages or bad weather, such as increasing the spacing between flights or keeping planes on the ground to ensure safety.
The FAA has examined runway lighting, emergency vehicles and other safety and security systems at 565 airports that are served by commercial airlines and declared them ready.
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited.
