Sensor is suspected in LAX landing beacon's outages

[question everything]

Sensor is suspected in LAX landing beacon's outages

Technicians using process of elimination now believe bad connection in the circuitry is at fault.
By Doug Irving
DAILY BREEZE
8/17/06

Technicians working to fix a key landing beacon at Los Angeles International Airport now believe a malfunctioning sensor may have shut the system down twice this month. The sensor wrongly reported a sudden shift in the beacon's signal just before both outages. Those outages slowed air traffic into LAX and delayed dozens of flights across the country.

A team of technicians has been working almost around the clock in recent days to find the problem and fix it. They were focusing late Wednesday on electric cables and sensors that keep track of the radio beam sent to pilots and watch for any problems. By jostling that system, they were able to re-create a malfunction that would have shut down the beacon -- suggesting a bad connection somewhere in its circuitry.

The Federal Aviation Administration planned to replace at least part of the monitoring system overnight. "They're fairly confident that this is it," spokesman Ian Gregor said. The beacon, known as a localizer, sends out a radio beam that pilots use to center their aircraft on the runway for landing. It had two significant outages this month within the span of a week, first on Aug. 7 and again on Monday.

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The monitoring system resides in a metal box, about 2 feet long and 2 feet wide, that is sometimes called the doghouse. When technicians struck the box to rattle the circuitry inside, the system issued a false alarm that would have shut down the beacon, said Roher, who had been briefed on the investigation... Circuits sometimes shake loose over the course of several years, said Ray Baggett, the western regional vice president of the systems specialists union. They can slip by such tiny increments that a technician would need a microscope to see the difference, he said. But those slips can add up over time -- "just enough," Baggett said, "that every once in a while the conditions are just right and it doesn't make the connection."

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Find this article at:
http://www.dailybreeze.com/news/articles/3589401.html

[soothsayer]

1. lol, I thought your title said "Senior is suspected..."

d'oh

[Parche]

2. runway

This LAX airport sensor scare has all the makings of an AL_Kida plot.......................