A group of more than 120 lawmakers across the United States on Friday (January 13) told the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) than your computer cut on Wednesday was “completely unacceptable,” demanding an explanation from the agency on how it will prevent such incidents in the future. In a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, House Transportation Committee Chairman Sam Graves and Democrat Rick Larsen said they intend to “conduct vigorous monitoring of the Transportation Department’s plan to prevent that these interruptions happen again,” according to a report by the Reuters news agency. he said early Saturday.
Lawmakers want a detailed report and answers about what caused the system failure, the FAA’s response to the problem, and the redundancy built into the system. They also want Buttigieg to provide the “estimated cost to commercial airlines and passengers due to delays resulting from the disruption,” despite the Transportation Secretary earlier saying the government will not compensate passengers for flight delays. caused by an FAA computer glitch.
On Wednesday, the FAA’s NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system experienced a major glitch that forced a temporary halt to all US domestic takeoffs, leading to thousands of delays and cancellations. Hours later, the agency said the NOTAM was reinstated and normal flight operations gradually resumed across the country. “Normal air traffic operations are gradually resuming in the US following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety information to flight crews. Ground stop lifted,” the FAA tweeted.
This is the first domestic grounding of departing flights since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The FAA said Thursday that its preliminary analysis showed the computer outage was caused by a procedural error related to a corrupted data file, but did not provide specific details about the problem.
In a separate development, Maria Cantwell, senior aide to the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, has asked the agency for a briefing next week on the discontinuation of the NOTAM database, Reuters reported citing an email. According to the email, Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen held a conference call with airlines on Wednesday to inform carriers and individual pilots that they could choose whether or not to fly despite the system outage. The email asked why airlines were in a position where they could have the option to choose to operate when the NOTAM system was down. He further noted that it appeared the ground stop actually lasted from 7:21 a.m. ET to 10:06 a.m. ET, but Buttigieg said it was lifted after 90 minutes. “When Secretary Buttigieg tweeted at approximately 8:50 a.m. that the ground stoppage had been lifted, was the NOTAM system fully operational at that time?” asked the mail.
(With contributions from agencies)
