FAA blames contractor for recent outage that affected thousands of flights
Jenny Goldsberry
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The Federal Aviation Administration announced that the source of its warning system’s recent outage was personnel error Thursday.
Its Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, system gives pilots important updated flight information. It went down and affected more than 10,500 flights “within, into, or out of the United States” on Jan. 11, according to the tracking website FlightAware. The flights were subsequently delayed.
“A preliminary FAA review of last week’s outage of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system determined that contract personnel unintentionally deleted files while working to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database,” a statement from the FAA read. “The agency has so far found no evidence of a cyber-attack or malicious intent.”
DELTA CEO BLAMES FAA OUTAGE ON INSUFFICIENT FUNDING
Since the outage, the administration has made necessary repairs and updated the NOTAM system to be more resilient in the future to prevent similar mistakes. The investigation into the situation is ongoing.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian would blame the government for the outage.
“I lay this on the fact that we are not giving [the FAA] the resources, the funding, the staffing, the tools, the technology they need,” Bastian said. “Hopefully, this will be the call to our political leaders in Washington that we need to do better.”
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The outage was the biggest travel disruption since the national no-fly order on Sept. 11, 2001.