One Manhattan power room took down FAA air traffic control in 1991
Summary
A 1991 outage in NYC knocked out FAA radar and communications across JFK, LGA, and EWR due to a failed 48V DC power plant at 33 Thomas Street. The post recounts a 10:10 generator transfer, four failure points in the alarm path, a lengthy silent discharge, and a seven-hour recovery, then argues that modern infrastructure mirrors this failure topology with buffers and metastable states; it links safety research and postmortems to lessons for software systems and AI infra.