Air travel thrown into chaos by system outage
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NEW YORK -- Thousands of flights across the U.S. were canceled or delayed 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. President Joe Biden said he directed the Department of Transportation to investigate.
The breakdown showed how much American 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 Tuesday and was not fixed until midmorning Wednesday, leading to more than 1,200 flight cancellations and more than 8,500 delays by early afternoon on the East Coast, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Airports in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta saw 30% to 40% 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," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told a news conference. Although the problem was soon fixed, he warned that travelers could expect to see some effects "rippling through the system."
Buttigieg said his agency would now 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 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Many of those systems "are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable, but they are out of date," he said.