The most extensive ground stop in the US since 9/11 was caused by an outage of the NOTAM system, a critical system to communicate hazards to pilots. These systems are crucial to the aviation industry and making sure it runs smoothly. Continue reading to learn more about the importance of NOTAM systems.
On the 11th of January 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US stopped all departing commercial flights, grounding aircraft all over the US. Hot on the heels of what’s now being referred to as the “Southwest meltdown,” outdated IT systems are once again centre stage. Wednesday’s outage caused the most extensive ground stop in the US since 9/11.
The system actually failed on Tuesday night, however initially flights were allowed to continue. A NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE was quickly put into place so that new data could be distributed verbally for the remaining traffic, which was not expected to be high. When the outage still wasn’t resolved by daybreak the following morning, it became clear that they could not continue to attempt to deal with the situation manually.
The first notice came as an urgent advisory from the FAA Air Traffic Control System Command Center released on Wednesday at 4am.
THE UNITED STATES NOTAM SYSTEM FAILED AT 2028Z. SINCE THEN NO NEW NOTAMS OR AMENDMENTS HAVE BEEN PROCESSED. TECHNICIANS ARE CURRENTLY WORKING TO RESTORE THE SYSTEM AND THERE IS NO ESTIMATE FOR RESTORATION OF SERVICE AT THIS TIME.
The FAA released a public statement at 12:15 UTC (7:15 am EST) that the Notice to Air Missions system had suffered an outage and airlines had been ordered to pause all domestic departures until 14:00 UTC (9:00 am EST).
Flights already in the air continued. They should already have the NOTAMs relevant to their flight and the truth is, if they didn’t, it wasn’t going to help to divert them elsewhere. In addition, most (but not all) transatlantic flights to the US continued.
At 08:15 EST, the FAA updated their site with the news that departures at Newark Liberty and Atlanta-Jackson airports had been resumed to alleviate congestion at those airports and reiterated that departures would resume at other airports at 09:00. In fact, the ground stop was lifted at 08:50.
That evening, the FAA released a further statement that they were continuing to review the situation as the root cause of the outage was not yet known. “Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack.”
Over 1,300 flights were cancelled while the system was down, with over 10,000 flights delayed., according to NBC News.
The NOTAM system dates from 1947 as a means of sharing important aviation information to pilots. It was based on Notice to Mariners which were used to notify ship captains of hazards at sea, which was developed by the US Navy in 1869. NOTAM stands for Notice to Air Missions in the United States and Notice to Air Men in the rest of the world.
The NOTAM system is run by aviation authority in any given country, in this case the FAA. The point of the NOTAM is to alert pilots to potential hazards which are either temporary or were not known far enough in advance to be included in charts and other published systems. When you plan a flight, whether you are flying an Airbus A380 or a Cessna 172, you check the NOTAMs on your route so that you know of any issues that may affect your flight.
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Original article published on fearoflanding.com