US aviation authorities halted flights nationwide early Wednesday after the failure of a key pilot notification system operated by the Federal Aviation Administration.
(Bloomberg) — US aviation authorities halted flights nationwide early Wednesday after the failure of a key pilot notification system operated by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The regulator ordered all airlines to delay departures for several hours “to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information,” the FAA said. The disruption stemmed from problems with the Notice to Air Missions system, or Notam, which conveys urgent advisory information essential for flight operations.
The agency said departures were resuming at airports in Atlanta, and Newark, New Jersey, due to air traffic congestion in those areas, and takeoffs at other airports were expected to resume around 9 a.m. Eastern time. There has been no indication that the computer outage has affected the FAA’s ability to track and guide aircraft.
The system disruption is one of the most significant in recent decades for the FAA and comes after a year of tests of the nation’s air system as the return from Covid-19 stressed airlines and air-traffic operations.
President Joe Biden has been briefed on the situation by Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the White House said Wednesday in a tweet. The president ordered a full investigation, but there is “no evidence of a cyberattack at this point.”
“They don’t know what the cause is,” Biden told reporters.
The computer system that shares the notices to pilots, airlines and other users began developing problems late Tuesday night and had to be completely taken down in the early hours of Wednesday, said a person familiar with FAA’s actions who asked not to be identified discussing the story as it develops. FAA technical workers have been troubleshooting the system since then, the person said.
By early Wednesday, passengers due to fly domestically began reporting delays on social media, and United Airlines Holdings Inc. said it would temporarily ground flights to all destinations.
Flight-tracking website FlightAware showed 2,512 delays for US flights at 8 a.m. New York time, a figure likely to grow. Southwest Airlines Co. has delayed 44% of its flights, with United at 5% and American Airlines Group Inc. at 6%, according to FlightAware data.
The biggest European airlines said they remain unaffected by the disruptions for the time being, with flights from British Airways, Air France and Deutsche Lufthansa AG operating normally, the carriers said.
Given the early hour of the disruption in the US, international flights were either still on the ground or nowhere near US air space, giving pilots more turnaround time to react.
Shares of most major US airlines were little changed before the start of regular trading in New York.
Real-Time Information
The Notam system provides airlines with real-time safety information for flight planning. The US airlines association, Airlines for America, said it’s been notified about the disruptions, and that it’s “working with the FAA and awaiting further information regarding when these issues will be resolved.”
The information conveyed on Notam can be as basic as airport weather and active taxiways or as complicated as temporary airspace closures due to a space launch or presidential travel. Pilots at all stages of training and experience are drilled in relying on the data.
A hotline has been activated, the FAA said on its website. The agency said later that some systems were starting to come back online before it ordered the halt in departures.
The new disruptions follow closely on a December operations meltdown at Southwest that forced it to cancel more than 16,700 flights and drove the airline to a fourth-quarter loss.
And entry for people arriving at airports across the US descended into chaos in 2019 after a Customs and Border Protection IT system failed, while an outage last August at United Airlines caused disruption across its network.
–With assistance from Chester Dawson.
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