The Federal Aviation Administration eliminated a ground stop on flights across the US following a computer glitch that resulted in thousands of delays and hundreds of cancellations rapidly cascading through the system at airports across the US. the country.
As a result, several flights to US destinations on Canadian airport departure boards showed delays of 30 minutes to over an hour, with some cancelled. Canada’s major airports advised travelers with US routes to check with their airlines about flight status before heading to the airport.
The blackout showed the world how dependent its largest economy is on air travel, and how dependent air travel is on an antiquated FAA computer system called the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system.
“Periodically there have been local issues here or there, but this is quite significant historically,” said Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations for American Airlines and now a consultant in Minneapolis.
Campbell said there have long been concerns about FAA technology, and not just the NOTAM system.
“Many of their systems are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable but outdated,” he said.
The NOTAM system went down Tuesday night, leading to more than 1,000 flight cancellations and 7,000 delayed flights by midday Wednesday, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta airports suffered between 30 and 40 percent of delayed flights.
“We’re going to see the ripple effect of that, the delays this morning in the system during the day,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in an interview on CNN. “Now we have to understand how this could have happened in the first place. Why the usual layoffs that would prevent it from being so disruptive didn’t stop it from being so this time around.”
because it’s still not clear
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday morning that US President Joe Biden was briefed on the situation and directed the Department of Transportation to investigate. There was no immediate evidence that the outage was caused by a cyber attack, Jean-Pierre said.
Before starting a flight, pilots should consult the NOTAM, which lists potential adverse impacts on flights, from runway construction to the possibility of icing. The system used to be telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for information, but has now moved online.
All aircraft must route through the system, including commercial and military flights.
Failures in the NOTAM system appear to be rare.
“I’ve been flying 53 years. I’ve never heard of the system failing like this,” said John Cox, a former pilot and now an aviation safety consultant. “So something unusual happened.”
According to the FAA advisories, the NOTAM system failed at 8:28 p.m. ET on Tuesday, preventing new or changed notices from being distributed to pilots. The FAA turned to a telephone hotline in an effort to keep sorties flying overnight, but as daytime traffic increased, it overwhelmed the telephone backup system.
Data from aviation analytics firm Cirium indicates that more than 21,400 flights were scheduled to depart from US airports on Wednesday. The carrying capacity of those flights was nearly 2.9 million passengers, though it is unclear how many tickets were sold.
Democrat Maria Cantwell, Chair of the US Senate Commerce Committee:
The number one priority is safety. As the Committee prepares for FAA reauthorization legislation, we will investigate what caused this outage and how redundancy plays a role in preventing future outages. The public needs a resilient air transportation system.
It was the latest headache for North American travelers, who faced holiday flight cancellations amid winter storms, as well as unrelated complications faced by Sunwing Airlines and Southwest Airlines passengers in late December.
Members of the House of Commons transport, infrastructure and communities committee will hold an all-day hearing on Thursday related to those issues. Executives from Sunwing, Air Canada and WestJet are scheduled to appear, as well as representatives from Transport Canada and executives from some Canadian airports.
