EQUIPMENT WOES IN L.A. STALL FLIGHTS COMMERCIAL AVIATION DISRUPTED NATIONWIDE.

Byline: RICK ORLOV Staff Writer

Southern California's air traffic was disrupted Monday for the second time in three weeks when a runway navigation system failed at Los Angeles International Airport and triggered delays for thousands of passengers nationwide.

Officials were working to determine what caused the instrument-landing system for Runway 25-Right to fail at 9:17 a.m. The Federal Aviation Administration said there were delays of more than an hour for all flights headed to LAX from around the country.

``The Federal Aviation Administration is looking at the equipment to determine what went wrong,'' LAX spokesman Paul Haney said. ``We did what we call turning the airport around to allow easterly takeoffs, and it took about 35 minutes to accomplish that. After that, it was a matter of playing catch-up to get the other planes out.''

LAX, the world's fifth-busiest airport, usually has two incoming and two outgoing runways. On July 31, the airport closed one arrival runway for a $333 million relocation project. To compensate, one of the departure runways was handling landings, too.

It was the shared runway that had the problem Monday. Each landing strip is outfitted with its own instrument-landing system that acts as a beacon to guide planes onto arriving runways.

By 10:45 a.m., controllers changed the landing configuration and reversed the direction of all flights, so the damaged equipment was not needed, FAA spokesman Mike Fergus said.

The FAA also put a ground-delay program into effect for all airports in the United States and Canada, Fergus said, and the number of landings, usually about one a minute, was reduced to 32 an hour.

The agency also transferred responsibility to San Diego for LAX air traffic control.

An official with the National Air Traffic Controller Association said the equipment problem wreaked havoc with air service across the country.

``There were planes all over the skies,'' NATC spokesman Tony Vella said. ``We're not only talking about the airplanes trying to land, but we're also talking about airplanes that (were) probably waiting at some other airport to get to Los Angeles. It was a mess.''

Vella said the controllers organization will closely watch what the FAA determines caused the problem.

Passengers at LAX were told to expect waits up to two hours before the system was able to catch up with all the incoming flights.

Some flights were placed in a holding pattern as they waited for approval to land.

Haney said pilots had been ordered to use the instrument-landing system because early morning fog and haze had created limited visibility at the airport.

Haney said the equipment at LAX is considered state of the art so there was no immediate answer to what went wrong.

Just three weeks earlier, more than 500 flights were delayed, diverted or canceled when a backup power system failed at the Palmdale air traffic control center that directs jetliners flying in and out of Southern California.

The three-hour outage July 18 occurred while the center was running on backup generators that started automatically after a vehicle knocked down a utility pole four miles away. That problem backed up flights across parts of the Western United States and Canada and shut down all telephone, electrical and radar functions at LAX.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

rick.orlov(at)dailynews.com

[phone]