Equipment Failures

New telecommunications equipment designed to deliver information to controllers in a San Diego facility that handles air traffic across Southern California malfunctioned early Wednesday, delaying 14 flights out of Ontario International Airport. The nearly two-hour outage started at the Terminal Radar Approach Control Center about 5:30 a.m.

The newest and most heavily used camera on the Hubble Space Telescope shut down over the weekend and appears to be permanently damaged, NASA said Monday. Though other cameras on Hubble remain operative, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which is used to peer back to the earliest and most remote galaxies in the universe, appears to be irreparable and will have to be replaced on the next Hubble servicing mission in September 2008.

A system that gauges visibility on runways at Los Angeles International Airport during heavy fog failed early Wednesday, forcing air traffic controllers to divert about six flights to other airports. A broken heating coil in a light sensor caused the equipment, which was tested three days ago, to malfunction, said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, which manages the nation's air traffic control network. The system went down about 4 a.m.

NASA is investigating problems with two instruments aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the agency announced this week. In November, scientists operating the probe's high-resolution camera noticed an increase in image "noise," such as bad pixels. A problem also developed in an instrument that maps temperature, ice clouds and dust in the atmosphere. Scientists discovered the instrument had a skewed field of view.

Kaiser Permanente's $4-billion effort to computerize the medical records of its 8.6 million members has encountered repeated technical problems, leading to potentially dangerous incidents such as patients listed in the wrong beds, according to Kaiser documents and current and former employees.

About 20,000 Verizon high-speed customers lost their Internet connections for 11 hours when a router malfunctioned during a routine upgrade. The outage, which began about 2 a.m., affected digital subscriber line, or DSL, customers from Long Beach and Whittier to San Clemente, said Jonathan Davies, a spokesman for Verizon Communications Inc. The router, he said, had to be wiped clean of data and reloaded, and the system was back up at 1:10 p.m.

About 40,000 Time Warner Cable Inc. customers in Costa Mesa and Claremont lost access to about 40 channels for several hours Tuesday when vandals cut a fiber-optic line carrying the signals, the company said. The affected channels included feeds from affiliates of broadcast networks. The channels went out at about 4:45 p.m., a spokeswoman said. Time Warner's high-speed Internet and phone service were not affected.

US Airways Group Inc. said problems with its computerized reservation and ticketing system will be "99% fixed" by the end of this week, after causing flight delays and long lines this month. The delays began March 4 when the Tempe, Ariz.-based airline tried to combine its computerized system with that of America West Holdings Corp.

The head of the Army Corps of Engineers said that excessive vibration problems with defective pumps at three major drainage canals in New Orleans would be fixed within seven weeks, before the 2007 hurricane season opened. "By the end of April, we will have those pumps operating effectively," Lt. Gen. Carl Strock told members of a Senate subcommittee. "We know what the problems are and we have the solutions in place."

Refineries in California and across the country are breaking down with unusual frequency this year, boosting prices at the pump and endangering workers and communities. The rash of oil plant problems may not be a coincidence. The breakdowns stem from the hard use of aging equipment, a shortage of trained workers, corporate cost cutting and ownership changes, refinery experts say.