At least 265 flights along the East Coast were delayed Wednesday night because of a rare computer glitch at the air traffic control center that serves the New England area, a Federal Aviation Administration official said yesterday.
Air traffic controllers at the Nashua flight center, officially known as Boston Center, had to shut down and reboot a computer system used to track flight routes, aircraft type, and other key information about planes flying in and out of the region, said Jim Peters, a spokesman for the FAA.
Delays affected flights at Logan International Airport and other New England airports as well as several international routes that travel in New England airspace on the way in and out of New York.
Peters said the breakdown did not compromise safety, but it did inconvenience. And it raised a bit of a mystery. Operators believe the problem is related to software, but sent a data-recording device to an FAA lab in Pomona, N.J., yesterday for further analysis, Peters said.
For 45 minutes starting at about 6 p.m., the controllers went to a backup system. As a result, they had to enter information about some planes manually, calling other air traffic control stations around the country to get information about aircraft type and other identification.
"This is an unusual event for Boston Center, and we have not seen this kind of a problem at any of our other centers," Peters said.
John Hansman, director of the MIT International Center for Air Transportation and an adviser to the FAA, said there is enough redundancy in the air traffic control system to keep planes safe when the primary computer system shuts down.
But it does make the job of air traffic controllers difficult because they are forced to memorize information about planes in the air, he said.
That is why the FAA limits the number of new planes in the air while the computer is being rebooted, he said.
"It's a large and complicated system which has been running for 30 years, and every once in a while it's going to have a problem," Hansman said.
Noah Bierman can be reached at nbierman@globe.com.
