CINCINNATI – For the second time in six months, a primary
radar failure Sunday morning at Cincinnati Tower (CVG) and
Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) and lack of
appropriate secondary radar feeds severely delayed scores of
flights into and out of the nation’s 14th-busiest airport at
the beginning of a morning rush hour period. It also exposed
again the lack of Federal Aviation Administration action to
give local CVG management the radar feeds necessary to keep
the airport running efficiently in the event of power
interruptions. The outage began at 7:36 a.m. EDT Sunday and
by the time it ended at 10:30, 29 departing flights were
delayed between 28 and 39 minutes each. Controllers
instituted a first-tier ground stop, meaning Cleveland Air
Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC, or “center”) and
Indianapolis Center put flights to CVG into holding
patterns.There are only two long-range radar feeds into CVG,
meaning that when controllers have to rely on secondary
radar, they cannot “see” planes on their radar scopes that
are below 5,000 feet. In those situations, such as on
Sunday, Cincinnati air traffic controllers were forced to
use non-radar procedures, which are based on time and
distance measurements and result in 10-mile gaps between
departing flights. The normal arrival rate into CVG is 108
aircraft per hour. During Sunday’s outage, that was cut to
32.“We need other radar feeds,” said Jason Hubbard, the CVG
facility representative for the National Air Traffic
Controllers Association. “The FAA has the ability to bring
others in, but it appears to be a cost problem.”

Simply put, local FAA management officials’ calls to senior
FAA officials to fix the problem have been ignored. Hubbard
said the FAA termed a similar radar outage in January
“unprecedented” and the likelihood of one happening again
was “rare.”