Travelers as flights are cancelled at Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) in Arlington, Virginia, US, on Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023.
Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Air travel disruptions eased Thursday, a day after a severe pilot safety alert system failure sparked the delay of near half of U.S. flights.
The Federal Aviation Administration halted U.S. flight departures early Wednesday after an outage of the Notice to Air Mission system, which provides pilots and others with safety information comparable to runway hazards.
The FAA said a preliminary review traced the outage to a “damaged database file.” The problems began around 3:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday. Unable to repair the issue, the FAA rebooted the system, and ordered the bottom stop, which it lifted around 9 a.m. on Wednesday.
That caused a cascade of U.S. flight delays, which totaled 10,563, in keeping with FlightAware. Greater than 1,300 flights were canceled.
The FAA said Thursday that it’s seeing “no unusual delays or cancellations this morning.”
Delays worsened throughout the day, nonetheless, with late U.S. flights totaling nearly 4,000 by 4:50 p.m. ET, in keeping with FlightAware. The FAA said in a tweeted video message Thursday morning that some flights may very well be disrupted by bad weather.
The outage and rare nationwide ground stop highlighted yet again how a failure of one among the many systems that underpin the U.S. aviation system can so dramatically derail air travel for a whole bunch of hundreds of passengers.
The incident got here just weeks after an internal Southwest Airlines platform was overloaded after mass cancellations from severe weather over the year-end holidays, making a dayslong meltdown that the carrier says could cost it greater than $800 million.
The FAA’s outage prompted questions from lawmakers on either side of the aisle, and can likely result in hearings and debate over additional funding for the U.S. aviation regulator. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg vowed to research.
“When there is a problem with a government system, we will own it, we’re going to seek out it and we will fix it,” he told reporters Wednesday.
There was no evidence of a cyberattack, the FAA said. Each the first and back-up systems were fed the corrupted data file, in keeping with an individual accustomed to the matter.
“The FAA is working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to stop this sort of disruption from happening again,” the agency said late Wednesday.
