FAA system outage spurs chaos at nation’s airports
Travelers stranded as flight delays, cancellations pile up after computer glitch
NEW YORK — Thousands of flights across the country were canceled or delayed Wednesday after a government system that offers safety and other information to pilots broke down, stranding some planes on the ground for hours.
The White House initially said that there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the outage that ruined travel plans for millions of passengers. President Joe Biden said he directed the Department of Transportation to investigate.
The outage showed how dependent the world’s largest economy is on air travel, and how much air travel depends on an antiquated computer system to generate alerts called NOTAMs — or Notice to Air Missions — to pilots and others.
Before a flight takes off, pilots and airline dispatchers must review the notices, which include information about weather, runway closures or construction, and other information that could affect the flight. The system was once telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for the information, but it has moved online.
The NOTAM system broke down late Tuesday and was not fixed until 9 a.m. EST Wednesday, leading to about 1,200 flight cancellations and more than 8,500 delays on the East Coast, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Even after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted the order grounding planes, the chaos was expected to linger. More than 21,000 flights were scheduled to take off Wednesday in the U.S., mostly domestic trips, and 1,840 international were flights expected to fly to the U.S., according to aviation data firm Cirium.
Airports in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York were seeing 30% to 40% of flights delayed.
“There was a systems issue overnight that led to a ground stop because of the way safety information was moving through the system,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at a news conference Wednesday. “That was resolved ... but through the day we’re going to see the effects of that rippling through the system.”
The FAA ordered all departing flights grounded early Wednesday, affecting all passenger and shipping flights. Some medical flights could get clearance and the outage did not affect any military operations.
Aviation experts could not recall an outage of such magnitude caused by a technology breakdown. Some compared it to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“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. “So much of their systems are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable but they are out of date,” he said.