FAA computer outage grounds flights nationwide
For the first time since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, commercial air traffic in the US came to a halt Wednesday morning, all because of a failure in a communications system that most travelers had never heard of before.
A NOTAM, or Notice to Air Missions, is a bulletin issued by the Federal Aviation Administration to pilots before they depart, which provides information about events that can impact their ability to safely make the trip. NOTAMs could warn that a runway is closed at the destination airport, for example, or that a military exercise or even a rocket launch will occur somewhere along a flight path.
Since NOTAMs can contain late-breaking information related to flight safety, it’s mandatory for commercial pilots to check all relevant bulletins before departing.
But scrambled files in a NOTAM database apparently led to the breakdown that grounded thousands of commercial flights throughout the country.
The FAA first issued a message about the outage on Twitter at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday.
But a posting on the agency’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center said the system went down on Tuesday at “2028z,” the military designation for 8:28 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, or 3:28 p.m. Eastern time. A brief statement from the agency described the problem as “an overnight outage.”
The FAA used a telephone hotline to assist pilots throughout the night. But by early Wednesday morning, with the system still down, there was no way a telephone service could serve thousands of departing flights, so the FAA issued a ground stop order at about 7:15 a.m. The order was lifted at about 9 a.m., and air traffic operations resumed.
“This is the first time this has ever happened, as far as I know,” said Tim Townsend, director of the flight training program at Bridgewater State University.
Mike McCormick, an assistant professor in the college of aviation at EmbryRiddle Aeronautical University in Florida, said the scale of the shutdown was extraordinary. “This event today is more significant than a hurricane making landfall in the United States,” McCormick said. “This had systemwide impact across the entire country.”
Invented in the 1920s, in the early days of commercial aviation, NOTAMs were modeled after similar bulletins issued to steamship captains. In 1947, an international conference on aviation established global standards for NOTAM for use by airlines worldwide.
A statement posted by the FAA on Wednesday evening blamed a damaged file in a database for the outage and added that there was no evidence of a cyberattack. There’s also no evidence so far that the problem extends to other portions of the air traffic control system.
Interviewed on CNN, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised an investigation to find out “why the usual redundancies that would stop it from being that disruptive did not stop it from being disruptive this time, and what the original source of the errors or the corrupted files would have
‘This event today is more significant than a hurricane making landfall in the United States.’
MIKE MCCORMICK assistant professor in the college of aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida
been.”
Townsend said that the incident is probably a one-off.
“I hesitate to say it won’t happen again,” he said, “but the likelihood is pretty slim.”