SAN DIEGO -- A brief power failure blackened the Miramar-area nerve center of the Southland's air-traffic guidance system Wednesday, forcing controllers monitoring thousands of planes onto backup power, officials said.

The outage at the northern San Diego facility lasted only 6 or 7 seconds, but it impacted airports from the Mexican border to Bakersfield, said Tony Vella of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

"You're talking about Los Angeles, Burbank, Van Nuys," Vella told KFWB radio in Los Angeles. "You're talking about Orange County, Long Beach, San Diego. You're talking about the Ontario airport, any of the secondary airports ... so every airport would be affected by something like that for airplanes that are inbound and getting air-traffic control services from Southern California."

Despite the interruption, however, flights into and out of Lindbergh Field were unaffected, said Diana Lucero, a public information officer for San Diego's bayside airport.

Officials at the FAA's operations office also said the problem did not compromise aircraft safety.

The outage knocked out all systems at the regional control facility near Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, according to Bob Marks, regional vice president for the controllers association.

"We lost our radio, and primary and backup radar," Marks said. "The standard procedure is that backup comes on and it did, momentarily, then we lost it again. Now we're on the generators and trying to determine the cause.

"The second outage lasted just a few seconds, but the backup generation is supposed to be immediate and we're trying to find out what the hiccup is."

Although officials said there was no immediate danger to air travelers, the outage surprised the 60 to 70 controllers who were working at the time.

"When an air-traffic controller is sitting at a radar scope and the entire room goes black, it's akin to driving up the freeway at 2 o'clock in the morning at 70 mph and every light you're using to reference is turned off," Vella told KFWB.