The severity of the disruptions to air travel decreased on Thursday, a day after a crucial pilot safety warning system failure caused the postponement of over half of all flights in the United States.
After an outage of the Notice to Air Mission system, which provides aircraft pilots with safety information including runway hazards, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suspended all aircraft departures in the United States early on Wednesday morning.
According to the preliminary investigation conducted by the FAA, the outage was caused by a “damaged database file.” On Tuesday afternoon, about 3:30 p.m., the problems began. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was unable to resolve the issue and so ordered a ground halt, which it later removed about nine in the morning on Wednesday.
According to FlightAware, this resulted in a domino effect of flight delays throughout the United States, which added up to 10,563. There was a total cancellation of almost 1,300 flights. On Thursday, there were close to 500 flights to, from, and within the United States that were delayed, and 63 were canceled.
The outage and the unusual ground halt throughout the country brought to light, once again, how the breakdown of one of the myriad systems that undergird the aviation system in the United States can so radically derail air travel for hundreds of thousands of people.
The incident occurred just a few weeks after the internal Southwest Airlines platform became overloaded as a result of widespread flight cancellations caused by severe weather during the holiday season. This caused a meltdown that lasted for several days, and the airline estimates that it could cost them more than $800 million.
“When there’s a problem with a government system, we’re going to own it, we’re going to find it and we’re going to fix it,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told reporters Wednesday.
According to the FAA, there was no indication of a hack. According to a source who is acquainted with the situation, the damaged data file was sent to both the main system and the back-up system.
“The FAA is working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again,” the agency said late Wednesday.
