Air traffic controllers responsible for much of the Southeast briefly lost their radar Friday after a fiber optic line was cut at a facility near Jacksonville but never lost the ability to direct planes.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the outage didn't lead to flight disruptions like what happened after similar outages around the Newark airport this spring.
Controllers maintained communication with because a backup system kicked in as designed.
The FAA said the radar center in Jacksonville continued operating but on alert status because its primary communication line went down. A contractor was working on repairing the severed fiber line Friday afternoon.
Authorities didn't specify what caused the severed fiber line or where it happened.
The control center, located about 30 miles north of Jacksonville, is responsible for planes flying across roughly 160,000 square miles of airspace across most of Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
The FAA didn't say how long the radar was offline.
When air traffic controllers in Philadelphia lost radar twice this spring, it took 90 seconds for systems to reboot. Those incidents led to major disruptions at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey because five controllers went on trauma leave after those outages, and the facility in Philadelphia directs planes in and out of the airport.
Hundreds of flights had to be cancelled in Newark because the remaining controllers couldn't safely handle every flight on the schedule. Operations at that airport have since improved significantly
The problems in Newark were blamed on the failure of aging copper wires that much of the nation's air traffic control system still relies on.
Transportation officials said the Newark problems demonstrated the need for a multimillion-dollar overhaul of the system that they are lobbying Congress to approve.
