Thousands of flights across the US were canceled or delayed on 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 said there was no evidence that a cyberattack triggered the outage, which upended travel plans for millions of passengers.
US President Joe Biden said he directed the US Department of Transportation to investigate.
Photo: AFP
The breakdown showed how much US air travel depends on an antiquated computer system that generates 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 details 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 on Tuesday and was not fixed until mid-morning on Wednesday, leading to more than 1,200 flight cancelations and more than 8,500 delays by early afternoon on the US east coast, flight-tracking Web site FlightAware said.
Even after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted the order grounding planes, the chaos was expected to linger.
More than 21,000 flights were scheduled to take off on Wednesday in the US, mostly domestic trips, and about 1,840 international flights expected to fly to the US, according to aviation data firm Cirium.
Airports in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta saw 30 to 40 percent 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,” US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg told a news conference.
Although the problem was soon fixed, he said that travelers could expect to see some effects “rippling through the system.”
Buttigieg said his agency would try to learn why the NOTAM system went down.
Longtime aviation insiders could not recall an outage of such magnitude caused by a technology breakdown. Some compared it to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the Sept. 11, 2001, 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.
Many of those systems “are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable, but they are out of date,” he said.
John Cox, a former airline pilot and aviation safety expert, said there has been talk in the aviation industry for years about trying to modernize the NOTAM system, but he did not know the age of the servers that the FAA uses.
“I’ve been flying 53 years. I’ve never heard the system go down like this,” Cox said. “So something unusual happened.”
According to FAA advisories, the NOTAM system failed at 8:28pm on Tuesday, preventing new or amended notices from being distributed to pilots.
The FAA resorted to a telephone hotline to keep departures flying overnight, but as daytime traffic picked up, the phone system became overwhelmed.
The FAA ordered all departing flights grounded early on Wednesday morning, affecting all passenger and cargo flights. Some medical flights could get clearance, and the outage did not affect any military operations.
Biden said that he was briefed by Buttigieg.
Buttigieg said that “safety is going to be our north star, as it always is.”
“We are now pivoting to focus on understanding the causes of the issue,” he said.
European flights into the US appeared to be largely unaffected. Carriers including Ireland’s Aer Lingus and Germany’s Lufthansa said their schedules were unaffected.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS