The Federal Aviation Administration says a brief power outage at a Southern California airport's air traffic control tower forced controllers to use portable radios to communicate with pilots and caused a number of flight delays.

Agency spokesman Ian Gregor says the outage Sunday at John Wayne Airport in Orange County lasted a little more than an hour.

Gregor says the tower had been running on an emergency generator since commercial power failed Friday. He says the backup generator stopped working at 11:42 a.m. Sunday, but the tower was able to revert back to commercial power by 1 p.m.

throughout the outage, controllers used radios to guide pilots through landings. Gregor says around 10 departing flights were delayed by a little over a half-hour.

Gregor says FAA technicians have determined what went wrong with the generator and are fixing it.

Frankfurt airport’s ground crew is scheduled to resume a strike over pay this morning as workers await a labor court ruling on whether they can continue their protests longer than scheduled.

The Frankfurt Labor Court last night approved an application by their employer DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH, airport owner Fraport AG and Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Germany’s biggest airline, to stop a sympathy strike by control-tower staff. Fraport and Lufthansa have filed a separate injunction to halt the current ground staff strikes.

The further strikes were “disproportionate” and would not solely serve to support the other strikes, the court said in an e-mailed statement, adding that it would allow an appeal. Three spokesmen for the Gewerkschaft der Flugsicherung union, which represents the ground controllers, did not immediately respond to calls to their mobile phones after normal business hours.

The GdF union had called on about 100 members of tower crews to join the action from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. today to show “solidarity” in the dispute over pay and the outsourcing of employment contracts.

About 200 flights, or 16 percent of the scheduled total, were scrapped yesterday in the latest action by ground controllers slated to run until 5 a.m. on March 1, according to Fraport.

The labor court is due to hear this morning the second injunction application, in which Fraport and Lufthansa will seek to stop the GdF union from continuing the ground controllers’ action beyond 5 a.m. on March 1, when it’s slated to end.

Lufthansa, whose main hub is Frankfurt, is the party most affected by the dispute, with losses “significantly” in excess of 10 million euros ($13 million) so far, Stefan Lauer, a board member at the Cologne, Germany-based carrier, said yesterday.

Talks aimed at ending the dispute broke down Feb. 24 after Fraport offered terms similar to those agreed at Munich airport. That deal was worth less than one proposed before the start of mediation, according to the GdF group, which has said it will no longer give 24 hours’ notice of any further action.

The union has said it favors proposals from mediator Ole von Beust for a two-step monthly wage increase of between 200 euros and 1,600 euros. It also wants any outsourced jobs to move to a single company on a single contract.

For commuter convenience and enhanced connectivity to the high speed Airport Metro Express Line (AMEL), a multi-level car parking is coming up close to Shivaji Stadium Metro station in central Delhi, officials said on Monday.

To be operational in a month's time, the parking facility will be close to Connaught Place and provide relief to thousands using the metro.

"The new multi-level parking area will come up at Shivaji Stadium Airport Metro station, with a parking capacity of 1,400 cars. It will be operational by the end of this month," said a spokesperson of Reliance Infrastructure, the concessionaire company.

Already, a multi-level car parking is operational at New Delhi Airport Metro station.

"The multi-level parking lot will give additional commuter convenience and connectivity to the airport Metro. These parking lots can be used by non commuters who need to park their cars and enjoy the retail experience at these Metro stations," said the spokesperson.

Currently the AMEL attracts a footfall of 20,000 on an average every day. The metro authorities require more ridership with the opening of car parking facilities.

Built at a cost of Rs.5,700 crore, the 23km Airport Metro Express line has six stations: New Delhi Railway Station, Shivaji Stadium, Dhaula Kuan, Delhi Aero City, Indira Gandhi International Airport and Dwarka Sector 21.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is looking for monitor the levels of radiation that its employees are exposed to from X-ray technology, as well as airport body scanners, a document from the agency says.

In the document, the TSA said it plans to begin performing radiation measurements using personal dosimeters, which are devices worn on the body that calculate a person's exposure to radiation, at certain airports. Such devices are used by people who work near sources of radiation such as hospital and nuclear power-plant employees.

"The measurements will assist the TSA in find out if the Transportation Security Officers (TSO) at selected federalized airports are exposed to ionizing radiation above minimum detectable levels, and whether any measured radiation doses approach or exceed the threshold where personnel dosimeter monitoring is necessary by [Department of Homeland Security]/TSA policy," according to the document, which was posted on a government website.

The purpose of the document, called "asking for information," is to discover and collect information on vendors that could supply personal dosimeters to the TSA.
Personal dosimeters measure accurately how much radiation a person receives, so the levels can be compared with the limits set by the government.

Experts today show surprise that such devices, which are needed by law for anyone who works with radiation, were not already used by airport screeners.

"I wouldn’t dream of them not having that already," said Dr. Nagy Elsayyad, a radiation oncologist at the University Of Miami Miller School Of Medicine. "They really should have some form of monitoring tool," Elsayyad said.

"By any possible definition, they are radiation workers," said David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

Airport screening and radiation

Some of the airport body scanners, recognized as backscatter scanners, emit X-rays which bounce off the body to create an image. There are about 250 such scanners in use in the United States.

Michael McCarthy, a spokesman for TSA, said personal dosimeters are not at present used by TSA employees because the level of radiation they are exposed to "is well below the minimum threshold where personal dosimeters would be needed."
The actual levels of radiation exposure to airport security workers should be look into, he said. Elsayyad said the plan to start using personal dosimeters should be recommended.

Gray area

The body scanners produce about 0.15 microsieverts of radiation per scan. This dose is equivalent to the radiation a human being would be exposed to in two minutes of flying in an airplane, the TSA said.

The health effects of such small radiation doses are still unsure. "We're sort of in this very big gray area," said Dr. Jacqueline Williams, a radiation expert at the University of Rochester in New York. Though Williams said in a previous interview the effects to an individual passenger are probably negligible.

Two men were arrested by the custom officers at Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport for attempting to smuggle 44, 400 memory cards from Hong Kong. The incident occurs at midnight when the duo landed in a Jet Airways flight.

The duo has been recognized as Imran Abdul, 29 and Shakeeb Ghulam, 25. They were caught by the team of Air Intelligence Unit while they were departing through the green channel.

The accused had hid the memory cards in the washroom at the airport after they came to know that the custom officers were waiting for them. The officers retrieve memory cards after detaining Ghulam and Abdul.

"The accused are usual carriers and it was their routine to leave the baggage in the washroom so they can clear the green channel without any obstacle," said Additional Commissioner of Customs, Mahendra Pal.

Afterwards, officers came to know that it was their routine as they used to leave the baggage in the washroom and other person used to collect it from there. Throughout the questioning, the custom officers were shocked when they found out that person attached to their own department can be involved in the issue.

supposedly, the third person who was supposed to collect baggage from the washroom is a driver working with the custom department who has a pass to enter airport building. "Our investigations are on to discover if the driver is involved in the case or not. He has not been arrested up till now but the other two have been arrested who will be produced in the court on Friday," said a custom officer from the airport.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Passengers on a flight bound for San Francisco used emergency parachutes to evacuate a plane at Dulles International Airport outside Washington after the pilot noticed something was wrong with the engine.

Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority spokeswoman Kimberly Gibbs says the United Airlines flight was on the airport taxiway about 1 p.m. Wednesday when the pilot found a problem.

Gibbs says after the passengers were all off, the airplane headed back to the terminal.

It was not clear how many passengers and crew were on board.

For the third time, a United Express regional jet landing at Ottawa International Airport has skid off a rainfall-slicked runway in daylight.

No one was hurt; though the aircraft was badly broken and endured a fuel leak after the landing gear broke and punctured the underside of the wing. There was no fire.

After landing the flight from Chicago on Sunday afternoon, the pilots lost control of the small regional jet and it skidded off the track, Ottawa’s longest and widest. It turned around and its main landing gear under the wings broke as the aircraft slipped on the rain-softened ground.

Like all airlines, this one selected a moniker to identify its flights to air traffic control. Its choice: “Waterski.” So Sunday’s flight used call sign “Waterski 3363.”

Sunday’s mishap came hardly 15 months after another 50-passenger Embraer ERJ-145 landed part-way down Ottawa’s shorter runway after a flight from Washington and ran more than 150 metres off the end of the runway. Both pilots and one of the 33 passengers endured minor injuries and there was significant damage to the plane’s nose after the landing gear under the cockpit collapsed as the aircraft ran off the runway.

Canada Transportation Safety Board investigation into the June 2010 accident isn’t complete up till now.

But a TSB report is complete for a 2004 runway over-run by another Trans States Embraer-ERJ-145. It was a flight from Pittsburgh that landed part of the way down the runway, failed to stop and ran about 100 metres off the end. The TSB concluded the pilots approach in the rain was “high, fast, and not stabilized, resulting in the aircraft touching down nearly halfway down the 8,000-foot runway.”

All three runway mischance at Ottawa involved Brazilian-built Embraer-145 regional jets, flown by Trans States Airlines, a Missouri-based airline that paints its fleet of jets in United Express and US Airways Express colours and flies feeder services for the big airliners. Trans States didn’t react to repeated attempts to contact the airline.

Although pilots on Internet boards sometimes criticize about the smooth, slick asphalt surface at Ottawa, both its main runways are long enough to handle the world’s biggest and heaviest commercial jetliners, such as a Boeing 747 with a landing weight of more than 300 tons. Average landing weight for an Embraer-145 is 20 tons.

The longer of Ottawa’s two tracks and the one involved in Sunday’s incident is 10,000 feet long.