Reliability Engineering

How one Manhattan power room took down FAA air traffic control and disrupted 1,174 flights

Matt Horn reconstructs the September 17, 1991 AT&T outage at 33 Thomas Street, where rectifiers tripped during a generator transfer and batteries silently carried FAA landlines for six hours until they ran dry, cutting radar and radio to New York airports. He traces four broken links in the alarm path and draws lessons on buffers, restarts and monitoring.

Research · Reliability Engineering · Postmortems · Telecommunications · Aviation