© AP
U.S. pilot stands in front of a U-2 photo reconnaissance plane
U.S. pilot stands in front of a U-2 photo reconnaissance plane
On Wednesday at about 2 p.m., according to sources, a U-2 spy plane, the same type of aircraft that flew high-altitude spy missions over Russia 50 years ago, passed through the airspace monitored by the L.A. Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, Calif. The L.A. Center handles landings and departures at the region's major airports, including Los Angeles International (LAX), San Diego and Las Vegas.
The computers at the L.A. Center are programmed to keep commercial airliners and other aircraft from colliding with each other. The U-2 was flying at 60,000 feet, but the computers were attempting to keep it from colliding with planes that were actually miles beneath it.
Though the exact technical causes are not known, the spy plane's altitude and route apparently overloaded a computer system called ERAM, which generates display data for air-traffic controllers. Back-up computer systems also failed.
Comment: Something here doesn't quite add up. Presumably, the spy planes are flying over U.S. airspace regularly, so why is this incident being blamed on them? It seems quite likely that something else was the cause, and the PTB trotted out the U-2 planes as their lame excuse for the public. This begs the question, if it wasn't the spy planes causing the disturbances, what was the real cause?