Power outage at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport impacting flight

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

An equipment failure caused a power outage at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport Monday morning, impacting flights.

Shortly after 8 a.m., Arizona Public Service notified the airport about a partial power outage that affected systems in several terminals, according to Eric Everts, spokesperson for Sky Harbor.

Power was restored to Terminal 3 at 9 a.m. on Monday but “there continued to be significant impacts to Terminal 4. Power was still out in portions of Terminal 4 and Checkpoint C remained closed.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop at 15:48 UTC, or 8:48 a.m. Arizona time, due to loss of power. Though the two busiest airlines, Southwest and American, had both experienced flight complications, they began to release flights for departure and arrival shortly after.

The FAA canceled its ground stop for Southwest at 17:55 UTC, or 10:55 a.m. Arizona time. The power was fully restored around 2:15 p.m. local time, according to tweets from Phoenix Sky Harbor and APS.

Arizona Public Service Company workers were on-site conducting maintenance at the airport when a piece of electrical equipment failed. The equipment failure caused the outage in both terminals 3 and 4 in addition to injuring a worker.

The worker faced injuries that were not life-threatening but was transported to the hospital for treatment, according to APS.

“The health and wellbeing of our crew is of the utmost importance to us, and we will continue to monitor the employee’s condition,” the company said in a prepared statement.

Later in the day, APS said the worker “has been released from the hospital and is recovering at home.”

The failure happened “in a piece of equipment called a switching cabinet. We’re looking into what caused that failure,” APS said in a tweet around 2:30 p.m.

Arizona Corporation Commission Chairwoman Lea Márquez Peterson noted that the APS outages at “Terminals 3 & 4 would have impact” because Sky Harbor is an “economic gateway & hub,” but there was “no impact more important than protecting human life.” Peterson shared her relief that the employee had non-life-threatening injuries and that she wished them a speedy recovery, she tweeted.

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