Power Outage at Hobby Airport Air Traffic Control Center Ends After Flight Delays, Officials Say

Sep. 17—An air traffic control center at Hobby Airport lost power for several hours Saturday, causing flight delays in and out of the travel hub, according to officials.

The airport warned of "scaled down" operations at 9:45 a.m. because to the outage and urged travelers to check their flight status. Power was restored around 4 p.m., officials said in a tweet.

A small electrical fire to a Federal Aviation Administration generator caused the outage, said Houston Airports spokesman Augusto Bernal

"Aircraft are taking off and are landing but the space capacity has been reduced because of what's going on," Bernal said at the time of the outage, urging passengers to check for delays.

"Our focus right now is the passengers so people that have flights booked today really need to check the status because of the delays," Bernal said.

The FAA approach control in Houston is using air trafficking controllers to manage air traffic from the airport, according to Bernal.

Flight departures were delayed an average of about 40 minutes, while arrivals were pushed back about 35 minutes or more, according to FlightAware data. Incoming flights were delayed by more than a hour, the flight tracking website said. Despite the outage, only three flights had been canceled at the airport in the past 24 hours.

Nearly 80% of departures were flagged as "very late," according to FlightView.

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