FAA trying to recover after Chicago fire, suicide attempt

The Federal Aviation Administration is on the ground in Aurora, Ill., where a fire on Friday led to more than 1,000 canceled flights across the country.

The agency brought a cleanup crew to the suburban Chicago air traffic control center early on Saturday morning, it said, to dry out equipment and examine areas damaged by the Friday fire.

{mosads}According to the FAA, the fire was part of a suicide attempt in a telecommunications room at the FAA facility. The employee at the center of the incident is reportedly being treated by medical staff and officials have said the incident was not reated to terrorism.

“The FAA is using all the tools at its disposal to safely restore as much service as quickly as possible,” the agency said in an update on Saturday afternoon.

The agency’s Virginia command center is “working closely” with airlines that fly into or out of any Chicago-area airports, it added, to try and minimize the number of delayed or canceled flights.

At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, the FAA has handled 40 percent of the normal daily traffic, it said. At Midway International Airport, about 30 percent is being handled.

The FAA said the amount of traffic at those airports should increase over the course of the weekend.  

Friday’s outage caused a massive disruption to the nation’s skies, which had impacts across the U.S.

Air traffic controllers who would normally by working out of the Aurora center are now at a facility in Elgin, Ill., and other offices to help get the flight patterns back on schedule.