USA The Federal Aviation Administration today halted take-off flights across the country starting early this morning and continuing until 9 a.m. ET. The suspension—the first of its kind in the United States since the September 11, 2001 attacks—slowed thousands of flights and created a flurry of additional delays and cancellations throughout the day. . People familiar with FAA systems said the outage was unprecedented, but resolved years of frustration as the agency worked to move its complex processes to the cloud.
This situation was caused by an outage in a critical system that the FAA uses to distribute real-time data and warnings to pilots. Called NOTAM (Notification for Aviation Missions) alerts, the system is crucial for sharing information and coordinating many of the basic logistics of flying safely.
According to the FAA, the flight suspension is in effect “to allow the agency to verify the integrity of flight and safety information.” The agency said in an update this evening that a preliminary investigation traced the outage to “a corrupt database file.” The White House speak This morning there is no evidence that the system power failure is due to a cyber attack but is directing the Department of Transport to conduct a thorough investigation into the cause of the problem.
Michael McCormick, assistant professor in the College of Aeronautics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, told reporters at a news conference: “Today’s event is more important than a hurricane making landfall in the US, important. more than a blizzard closed an airport. meeting after the incident. “This has had a system-wide impact across the country.”
NAV Canada, a nonprofit consortium acting as the FAA’s Canadian partner, said today it has also experienced its own short-lived NOTAM system outage. Brian Boudreau, a spokesman for the company, said it was investigating the “root cause of the incident” but it did not believe the issue was related to the FAA’s previous troubles.
The NOTAM system is decades old and criticized by many pilots as cumbersome and inefficient. NOTAM alerts can be tens or even hundreds of pages long and are written in a kind of coded parallel language that has evolved over the years and from a variety of technologies, including Morse code, telegrams, and systems. Loran-C radio locator.
NOTAMs often include the same warning over and over again, as well as unnecessary details that automatically populate the system over weeks or months. A federal investigation has found that a hard-to-read NOTAM is capable of taking responsibility for a 2017 incident in which an Air Canada plane nearly collided with four different planes as it landed on a runway in San Francisco.
“The way they’re written in strange, hard-to-read code can certainly be improved,” said one pilot at a major commercial airline, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “And if you look at your release, there are sometimes around 80 NOTAMs, and you have to look closely at the date and time to make sure they are still valid.”
