Date: Sun, 26 Jul 92 00:58 GMT
From: Tansin A. Darcos & Company <0005066432@mcimail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: About MCI's LINCS ATC System
Organization: TELECOM Digest
X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 12, Issue 587, Message 7 of 11

MCI's LINCS to Connect Air-Traffic-Control System
By David Field    The Washington (DC) Times   (July 22, 1992-Page C1)

   MCI yesterday unveiled the nuts and bolts or, rather, the fiber
optics and multiplexers, of a communications system for air-traffic
controllers that the company is providing under its largest contract
ever.

   The Federal Aviation Administration project will be worth $1 billion 
to MCI Communications Corp.  over the next decade, MCI's president and
chief operating officer, Daniel F. Akerson, said yesterday.

   Some 50 MCI employees in the Tysons Corner [Virginia] area will
work on the project, and the Washington-based company will award
subcontracts to local firms, MCI's vice president for government
systems, Jerry A, Edgerton, told a reporter.

   The project is called LINCS, for Leased Interfacility National
Airspace Communications System.  It is designed to prevent emergencies
such as the September 1991 interruption to air-traffic control caused
by a telephone problem in New York City.

   It will link 156 air-traffic control units -- ranging from major 
regional command centers to individual airport towers -- to flight 
service stations that give private pilots flight information.

   The LINCS lines will also get air-traffic controllers' voice
commands to airplanes, carrying them over phone lines to remote radio
transmitters, which then send them to planes.

   A phone outage on Sept. 17 -- caused, as it turned out, by a gener-
ator failure -- forced the FAA to cancel 500 flights, stranding 37,000
passengers nationally and capping a long dispute over earlier phone
failures.

   The FAA, the Transportation Department unit that runs air-traffic
control, insisted that any company winning the contract would have to
design a system with 99.999 percent reliability.

   That, Mr. Akerson said, was equivalent to one loss by the
Washington Redskins in 5,000 seasons (counting pre-season games).

   MCI won the FAA contract to design a new system, besting American
Telephone & Telegraph and Sprint Corp.

   In case of a major outage, LINCS will restore service in an average
of 20 seconds, the company said.

   The LINCS system, to be installed in the Washington area by early
1995, will replace the FAA's existing collection of telephone
contracts with a single system with backup or redundancy capacity.

   All the phone lines to be used by the FAA -- 4.5 million circuit
miles -- represent about 3.2 percent of MCI's total capacity.

   MCI won the contract with an initial $558 million, three-year award
in March, but a protest by Sprint, a Kansas-based competitor, delayed
the start of work.

   Mr. Akerson said the system will be in operation in the Seattle
region by early next year, and LINCS will be installed in Southern
California in 1993.

   FAA spokesman Richard Stafford said that LINCS for the Washington
area, which is under control of a Leesburg air-traffic-control center,
would be operational by the first quarter of 1995.


Paul Robinson
TDARCOS@MCIMAIL.COM or 0005066432@MCIMAIL.COM