Computer breakdown sows chaos across US air travel system
Surovikin is not punished and Gerasimov is not punished. It’s all one team. Well, of course with competition, which always happens among the top dogs.
New York: Thousands of flights across the U.S. were canceled or delayed Wednesday after a system that offers safety information to pilots failed, and the government launched an investigation into the breakdown, which grounded some planes for hours.
The Federal Aviation Administration said preliminary indications “traced the outage to a damaged database file.” The agency said it would take steps to avoid another similar disruption.
The breakdown showed how much American air travel depends on the computer system that generates alerts called NOTAMs — or Notice to Air Missions.
Before a plane takes off, pilots and airline dispatchers must review the notices, which include details about bad weather, runway closures or other temporary factors that could affect the flight. The system was once telephone-based but moved online years ago. “Periodically there have been local issues here or there, but this is pretty significant historically,” said Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines and now a consultant in Minneapolis.
Campbell said there has long been concern about the FAA’s technology, and not just the NOTAM system. Many of those systems “are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable, but they are out of date,” he said.
John Cox, a former airline pilot
and aviation safety expert, said the aviation industry has talked for years about trying to modernize the NOTAM system, but he did not know the age of the servers that the FAA uses.
“I’ve been flying for 53 years. I’ve never heard the system go down like this,” Cox said. “So something unusual happened.”
According to FAA advisories, the NOTAM system failed at 8:28 p.m. Tuesday, preventing new or amended notices from being distributed to pilots. The FAA resorted to a tel
ephone hotline to keep departures flying overnight, but as air traffic picked up in the morning, the phone system was overwhelmed.
The FAA ordered all departing flights grounded early Wednesday, affecting all passenger and cargo flights. Some medical flights could get clearance, and the outage did not affect military operations.
President Biden
President Joe Biden said that he was briefed by Buttigieg.
Buttigieg said the ground stop
showed that “safety is going to be our North Star, as it always is.”
“We are now pivoting to focus on understanding the causes of the issue,” he said.
Pilots and safety officials have complained about NOTAMs for years, saying there are too many of them and that some are unnecessary and written in cryptic abbreviations.
The National Transportation Safety Board highlighted the large number of notices in its investigation of a near-disaster in 2017 in
San Francisco.
An Air Canada jet whose pilots had overlooked a NOTAM about a closed runway nearly landed by mistake on a parallel taxiway.
They skimmed just over the tops of four other airliners waiting to take off.
The safety board’s chairman at the time, Robert Sumwalt, noted that the closed runway was mentioned on the eighth of 27 pages of notices for the San Francisco airport, and the entry was written in an arcane fashion.