United States The Federal Aviation Administration today halted flights across the country from early this morning until 9 a.m. ET. The pause – the first of its kind in the United States since the attacks of September 11, 2001 – delayed thousands of flights and created a cascade of new delays and cancellations throughout the day. Those familiar with the FAA’s systems say the outage is unprecedented, but ends years of frustration as the agency works to move its complex processes to the cloud.
The situation was caused by a failure of a critical system used by the FAA to distribute real-time data and warnings to pilots. Known as NOTAM (Notice to Air Mission) alerts, the system is essential for sharing information and coordinating much of the basic logistics of a safe flight.
According to the FAA, the flight pause came into effect “to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.” The agency said in an update this evening that a preliminary investigation attributed the outage to “a damaged database file.” The White House said As of this morning, there was no evidence that the system outage was caused by a cyberattack, but he ordered the Ministry of Transportation to conduct a full investigation into the cause of the incident.
“This event today is bigger than a hurricane making landfall in the United States, bigger than a blizzard closing an airport,” said Michael McCormick, an assistant professor in the University’s College of Aviation. Embry-Riddle Aeronautics, to journalists at a press conference. conference following the incident. “This has had a system-wide impact across the country. »
NAV Canada, a non-profit corporation that serves as the Canadian counterpart to the FAA, said today that it also experienced its own brief NOTAM system outage. Brian Boudreau, a company spokesman, said it was investigating the “root cause of the failure” but did not believe the problem was related to previous FAA problems.
The NOTAM system has existed for several decades and is widely criticized by pilots for its cumbersome and ineffectiveness. NOTAM alerts can be dozens or even hundreds of pages long and are written in a sort of parallel coded language that has evolved over many years and from many technologies, including Morse code, telegrams, and radio navigation system Loran-C.
