Come fly with me
Dominic Green
On the night of Jan. 10, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, system broke down. The FAA cannot operate safely without NOTAM alerts, which give pilots information about potential hazards or changes along their routes, including storms and technical failures at airports. By 9:30 the next morning, according to FlightAware.com, more than 5,400 international and domestic departures were held on the ground, and nearly a thousand were canceled. (The FAA does not self-report this information — surprise, surprise.) The usual misery ensued as the FAA gradually restored the usual miserable service.
Ladies and gentlemen, please ensure your seat belts are fastened and your tray tables stowed away. We are about to experience unprecedented levels of bulls***. It is too early to know why the FAA shut down. We may never know for sure. If you believe this administration willingly tells us the truth about anything, I have an experimental vaccine for your infant children that will stop them from ever catching or spreading the ‘rona.
Down here on the ground, because we’re not flying today, three possibilities come to mind. The first is that on the night in question, molten cheese from someone’s Uber Eats dripped into the mainframe, triggering a catastrophic systems failure that sent the United States back into the early 20th century, only without the civility. This is possible. We should always allow for accidents unless we’re on a plane that’s crashing because the FAA’s systems weren’t properly maintained.
Which brings us to the second possibility: America’s transport infrastructure is as overloaded as Chris Christie’s pants. The highways are potholed and crumbling. Mass transit is a massive insult to the taxpayer. Crossing a bridge feels like the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter. The airports are filthy and crowded. The planes never take off on time. Sometimes they don’t turn up at all. If the federal government ran a cruise line, all the passengers would die from norovirus.
These two possibilities, human error and systemic decay, feed into each other. When a system is overloaded and overworked, security and updates become luxuries. There won’t be funding for a backup system or for the cheese shield that protects the mainframe from accidental drippings. There also won’t be funding for protecting the system from malicious actors. And I don’t mean Mel Gibson.
This, the third possibility, was officially discounted right away, so you know what that means. On the morning of Jan. 11, Karine Jean-Pierre, the human lie who fronts the loveless telenovela that is the White House press office, said there is “no evidence of a cyberattack at this point.” There was, at that point, no evidence at all — and not only because an absence of digital fingerprints is the hallmark of a professionally executed cyberattack. The authorities were asleep, literally.
At 8:28 p.m. EST on the evening of Jan. 10, the FAA’s System Command Center in Washington, D.C., posted a notice on its web page that the NOTAM system had failed. An aviation-mad Twitter user named Stephan Segraves spotted it just before midnight EST and tweeted out a screenshot of the System Command Center’s warning that “technicians are currently working to restore the system and there is no estimate for restoration of service at this time.”
Through the night, the FAA made no effort to notify travelers. The first public announcement came at 6:23 a.m. from NBC News, which is not a government agency, at least not officially. The FAA tweeted out a warning to travelers at 6:29 a.m. EST. By 7:01 a.m., Pete Buttigieg, supposedly the secretary of transportation, had roused himself from his beauty sleep and tweeted that “I have been in touch with FAA this morning about an outage affecting a key system for providing safety information to pilots.”
Just over half an hour later, at 7:39 a.m., Jean-Pierre tweeted that Buttigieg had “briefed” President Joe Biden and that Biden had “directed DOT to conduct a full investigation.” By then, the airports were jammed with non-flyers hoping to fly on nonexistent flights. Time and money went down the drain, followed by the hope that anyone in charge knows what they’re doing or gives a damn.
The federal government sifts our emails and listens to our calls for evidence of sedition, but it can’t send a simple text when the airports shut down. Nearly 12 hours passed between the NOTAM failure notification and the secretary of transportation deigning to communicate with the public. We might call that inexcusable were it not that the excuses were being offered before the explanation.
At 6:20 a.m., NBC News posted an inaccurate account: “The FAA said in a notice on its website that its Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system had ‘failed’ Wednesday morning.” Unless you’re an aviation-mad Twitterhead, you wouldn’t have known that the system had actually failed on Tuesday night. NBC didn’t share the “overnight computer outage” part with the public until 11:32 a.m. By then, its headline gently spun the bad news away: “Air traffic slowly resuming after ground stop has been lifted.”
In other news, tractor production is up, and the people’s heroic farmers expect a record-breaking turnip harvest.