Air-Traffic Controllers Disclose Flaws in New Radar System

By Jon Hilkevitch, Chicago Tribune

Jan. 25–Air-traffic controllers who last year raved about the potential safety improvements offered by a new ground radar system at O’Hare International Airport have done an abrupt about-face, characterizing the technology on Thursday as an accident waiting to happen.

The equipment, designed to help prevent collisions, is supposed to display all planes and vehicles on the airfield on monitors in O’Hare’s air-traffic tower, but it misses objects as big as a Boeing 747, the controllers said.

The problem with the system, known as ASDE-X, worsens when snow is falling, even though it was designed to be of greatest help during bad weather when visibility is often poor, they said. ASDE-X is in the midst of its first winter at O’Hare.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it is normal for the system to require fine-tuning in the first year of operation. “The controllers association leadership is talking out of both sides of its mouth,” said FAA spokesman Tony Molinaro, citing the union’s praise of the system when it was tested at O’Hare last summer.

But the chief of the controllers union at O’Hare called on the FAA to quickly fix the glitches or bring back the old radar system, which was prone to break down and emit false alarms. “I thought ASDE-X was going to be absolutely perfect, but we now know that the computer decides what it is going to display and what it is going to ignore,” said Joseph Bellino, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association at O’Hare.

“We can’t tell pilots they are clear to land and just hope that they don’t run into a broken-down dump truck that nobody knew was on the runway,” Bellino said.

No accidents or close calls have been linked to ASDE-X, according to the FAA, which is deploying the system at major airports in a safety move to help controllers track aircraft on the ground with greater accuracy.

The FAA acknowledged Thursday that ASDE-X failed to detect “long lines of snowplow vehicles while they were on the airfield.”

The FAA is working on the problems, Molinaro said.

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