Logan Airport Still Stuck With Delays

A new radar antenna has been installed at Boston's Logan Airport, but travel delays and flight cancellations are expected to continue for at least one more day.

That's because the software to operate the new antenna is going to take a day or more to install. Dan Rea of CBS Station WBZ-TV reports it may be midweek before the radar is fully operational.

The new antenna is replacing a ASR-9 radar antenna which fell over Saturday morning in winds estimated at about 45 miles per hour, far less than the hurricane-force winds the $8 million system was designed to withstand.

Logan is operating on a reduced scale of flights, using a "composite" system of radar from Truro, on Cape Cod; Cummington, in western Massachusetts; and Providence, Rhode Island.

Delays and cancellations at the nation's ninth busiest airport made air travel a major challenge over the holiday weekend, with more than 350 flights cancelled Saturday and Sunday.

Abby Lang, who came to Boston with her aunt to celebrate her 16th birthday, voiced the frustration thousands of others felt in and around the airport. "We were supposed to be home by now," says Lang, whose flight home to Washington, D.C., was routed to New Hampshire and delayed for four hours.

The airport, which normally handles about 60 arrivals an hour, is down to just 16 an hour. The delays and cancellations at Logan have a ripple effect which is being felt at airports all along the East Coast.

The collapse of the radar antenna at Logan has raised a key question at the Federal Aviation Administration, which wants to know how the antenna could have fallen over in winds considerably less than those it was designed to resist.

The same type of radar equipment is used at 143 other airports across the country. The FAA says each system should be checked to make sure that the same thing does not happen at those airports.