An American Airlines Airbus A319 airplane takes off past the air traffic control tower at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, January 11, 2023
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
Federal Aviation Administration acting Administrator Billy Nolen told a Senate panel Wednesday that recent procedures will avoid a repeat of events that caused an outage and prompted it to halt departing air traffic last month for the primary time because the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The Senate Commerce Committee hearing comes amid growing safety concerns about aviation safety after several close calls involving major U.S. airlines. Nolen said in a memo on Tuesday that he’s starting a security review team and called a gathering of economic and general aviation leaders next month.
Wednesday’s panel centers on an outage on Jan. 11 of the Notice to Air Missions system, or NOTAM, which provides safety alerts to pilots resembling icy runways and other hazards. The system failed when a contractor unintentionally deleted files during an update, the FAA has said.
“After the incident, we implemented a synchronization delay to be sure that bad data from a database cannot affect a backup database,” Nolen said in prepared remarks ahead of the hearing. “Moreover, we’ve got implemented a recent protocol that requires a couple of individual to be present and engaged in oversight when work on the database occurs.”
The FAA halted departing flights due to the outage for nearly two hours, but delays lasted throughout the day, just weeks after Southwest Airlines holiday travel meltdown within the wake of a severe winter storm.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the committee’s highest-ranking Republican, pressed Nolen on improvements to the NOTAM system: “Can a single screwup ground air traffic nationwide?”
Nolen replied: “Could I sit here and inform you there won’t ever be a problem on the NOTAM system? No, sir, I cannot. What I can say is we’re making every effort to modernize and have a look at our procedures.”
Nolen is facing questions from senators on the recent close calls between large industrial aircraft in Recent York and Austin, Texas. On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board said it’s investigating what occurred on a United Airlines flight that plunged after which recovered shortly after departing from Maui’s Kahului Airport in Hawaii on Dec. 18.
United didn’t immediately comment on the incident, which was first reported on Sunday by The Air Current.
