LOS ANGELES — About 2,500 international passengers were stranded for as long as five hours Saturday August 11 on planes and in terminals at Los Angeles International Airport because a computer shutdown prevented them from passing through customs, authorities said.
The passengers were stranded in four airport terminals and on runways starting at about 1:30 p.m. because of a breakdown in a computer system that contains names of arriving passengers and law enforcement data about them including arrest warrants, said Mike Fleming, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman.
"That system allows our officers to make decisions on who we can allow to enter the United States," Fleming said. "You just don't know by looking at them." The cause of the shutdown was not known, and there was no estimate on when the system would be repaired, Fleming said.
Authorities had begun using a backup system by 7:45 p.m. and were processing passengers in order of their arrival. However, the system could only support half of the inspection booths normally used by customs officers, Fleming said.
Customs officials were working to divert incoming flights to airports in Ontario, Calif., and Las Vegas, Fleming said. Terminals that normally accept international passengers have been full since at least 2:30 p.m., and passengers arriving since then have had to remain on the runway including the Philippine Airline flights coming in from Manila.
"This is just unbearable," said Gaynelle Jones, 57, who landed on a 13-hour flight from Hong Kong at about 2:15 p.m. and was still sitting on her plane five hours later. She said she had missed her connecting flight to Houston. "We've already been on a plane for several hours, and they have no timeframe for when we'll be able to get off," Jones told The Associated Press from her cell phone.
LAX has about 25 daily nonstop and direct flights (may stop more than once but continues to have the same flight number) from Asia, including China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia. There are an additional 25 connecting flights from Asia (i.e., Asian flights that land at another U.S. airport and then connect passengers that board flights to LAX).
Airport and customs officials offered conflicting numbers of how many people were delayed by the computer malfunction. Estimates were about 11,000 people directly affected; customs officials put the number at 20,000. Six travelers were ultimately detained because of passport or agriculture questions.
A second glitch in as many days with the U.S. Customs' screening system stalled international passengers headed in and out of Los Angeles International Airport early Monday morning August 13, according to federal and city officials. Meanwhile, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection is investigating the root cause of the electrical problems and is studying measures to keep the outages from occurring again.
The screening system first went down around 2 p.m. Saturday, leaving nearly 17,400 passengers on 73 flights stranded for about 10 hours at LAX's Tom Bradley International Terminal. The system was operating by midnight but shut down again around 11:50 p.m. Sunday, according to Michael Fleming, a spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection's Los Angeles field office.
Airport operations were up and running again by 2 a.m. Monday, but that problem delayed about 1,700 passengers. Further, the computer's backup system failed to engage properly in both instances. Computers of U.S.Customs were able to be up and operational the following day but the back-logged flights caused even more delays. Today it is back to normal and the computers are operational until, well, the next computer crash.