FAA NOTAM Failure Reveals Important System Everyone Hates

United States The Federal Aviation Administration today suspended flights nationwide starting early in the morning and continuing until 9 a.m. ET. The pause – the first of its kind in the US since the September 11, 2001 attacks – delayed thousands of flights and triggered a string of further delays and cancellations throughout the day. Those familiar with the FAA’s systems say the disruption is unprecedented, but it ends years of frustration as the agency works to move its complex processes to the cloud.

The situation was caused by a failure in a critical system the FAA uses to relay real-time data and warnings to pilots. This system, known as NOTAM (Notice to Air Mission) alerts, is vital for sharing information and coordinating many of the essential logistical processes for safe flight.

According to Federal Aviation Administration, the in-flight pause went into effect “to allow the agency to verify the integrity of the flight and safety information.” The agency said it was not immediately clear what caused the NOTAM to crash. The White house said There was no evidence this morning that the system outage was caused by a cyberattack, but the Department of Transportation was instructed to conduct a thorough investigation into the causes of the incident.

“Today’s event is more significant than a hurricane that made landfall in the US, more than a snowstorm that closed an airport,” Michael McCormick, an assistant professor of aviation at the Embry-Riddle Aviation University, told reporters. conferences after the incident. “It had a system-wide impact across the country.”

NAV Canada, a non-profit corporation that is the Canadian partner of the FAA, said today that it also experienced a brief outage in its own NOTAM system. Brian Boudreau, a company spokesman, says it is investigating “the root cause of the failure” but does not believe the issue is related to earlier FAA issues.

The NOTAM system is decades old and has been widely criticized by pilots for being cumbersome and inefficient. NOTAMs can span tens or even hundreds of pages and are written in a kind of coded parallel language that has evolved over many years and based on numerous technologies, including Morse code, telegrams, and the Loran-C radio navigation system.

NOTAMs often include the same warning repeated multiple times, as well as non-essential details that are automatically filled in the system for weeks or months in a row. A federal investigation found that the hard-to-read NOTAM was probably responsible for a 2017 incident in which an Air Canada plane nearly collided with four different aircraft while landing on a San Francisco runway.

“The way they are written in strange, hard-to-read code could certainly be improved,” says a pilot for a major commercial airline, who asked not to be named because he is not allowed to speak to the press. “And if you look at your release, sometimes there are like 80 NOTAMs and you have to look closely at the dates and times to make sure they are still up to date.”