Aviation officials criticized U.S. Customs on Monday for being unprepared and taking too long to fix the weekend computer failure at LAX that left more than 17,000 international passengers stranded for hours in airplanes.
Accustomed to frequent, short-lived outages, customs officials said they mistakenly believed their computers would be up and running within an hour Saturday.
Then they made another mistake, aviation officials said. They misdiagnosed the problem, deciding it involved high-speed communications lines that link to the national law enforcement databases used to assess possible security threats posed by arriving passengers.
They called in the service provider, Sprint Nextel Corp.
But a technician did not arrive for four hours, aviation officials said, and took three hours to determine that the transmission lines were not the problem.
By then, the passenger processing backlog had spiraled out of control, with thousands trapped in airplanes on the ground, even as more planes were arriving.
"We're concerned about the slow response by customs," said Steve Lott, chief spokesman in North America for the International Air Transport Assn. Although "we understand that computer systems are not perfect, the frustration is why customs had no contingency plan."
Michael Fleming, spokesman in Los Angeles for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, said agency officials worked as quickly as possible.
"We did everything we could," he said. "We certainly weren't expecting something of this magnitude. In the past, if we had a little glitch," the computers "came up right away."
That's what happened more than 24 hours later, when customs computers crashed again. They were down for about 80 minutes late Sunday night and early Monday for what officials said were problems unrelated to Saturday's issues. They declined to provide details.
Fleming said he did not know about the delay in Sprint arriving Saturday. "I know we contacted them."
He said Saturday's breakdown was the result of a hardware malfunction that prevented access to the agency's local network. It was finally pinpointed and fixed by agency employees and another computer contractor nine hours after the system crashed.
