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WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 (PTI) – Normal air traffic operations were gradually resuming across the United States on Wednesday after a technical glitch in a key pilot notification system grounded thousands of flights for hours.
The FAA announced earlier in the morning that it was discontinuing its Notice to Air Tasks, or NOTAM, which is used to alert pilots and others to problems in the air.
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The FAA ordered airlines to delay all domestic flights early Wednesday morning, but canceled ground stops by 9 a.m. ET a few hours later.
“Normal air traffic operations are gradually resuming across the United States following an overnight outage in the air task notification system that provides safety information to crews. The ground stop has been lifted. We continue to investigate the cause of the initial issue,” the FAA said in a statement. said in the tweet.
Read also | FAA outage: Normal air traffic operations are gradually returning across the United States.
So far, more than 6,700 flights within, into and out of the United States have been delayed and more than 1,000 canceled due to system glitches, according to flight-tracking company FlightAware.
Even as the agency removed ground stops, the number of cancellations and delays continued to climb.
More than 21,000 flights, mostly domestic, are expected to depart the U.S. on Wednesday, while about 1,840 international flights are expected to depart the U.S., aviation data firm Cirium was quoted by The Associated Press as saying.
Airports have been advising passengers to check with individual airlines for the latest flight status.
The FAA earlier said it was making progress in restoring its air task notification system, and departures were being resumed at Newark Liberty International Airport and Atlanta International Airport due to air traffic congestion in those areas.
“We expect other airports to resume flights by 9 a.m. ET,” it said.
“All flights currently in the skies are safe to land. Pilots check the NOTAM system prior to flight. Air mission notifications alert pilots to runway closures, equipment failures, and other potential hazards along the flight path or at locations that may affect the flight,” the U.S. The FAA said.
It earlier said operations across the national airspace system were affected.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg briefed President Joe Biden on the FAA system outage.
Biden said Buttigieg told him they hadn’t identified what went wrong.
“I just spoke to Buttigieg. They don’t know what the cause was. But I was on the phone with him for about 10 minutes,” Biden said. “I let him know and reported it directly to me. The air traffic is still safe to land, it’s just not taking off right now. We don’t know what’s causing it.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a tweet that there was no evidence of a cyberattack but the president “directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into the cause. The FAA will provide regular updates.
Transportation Secretary Buttigieg said he was in contact with the FAA and monitoring the situation.
“I have been in contact with the FAA this morning because the outage affected a critical system that provides safety information to pilots. The FAA is working to resolve this issue quickly and safely so air traffic can resume normal operations and will continue to do so. Provide an update,” he said in a tweet.
In an interview with CNN, Buttigieg said there was no direct evidence or indication of a cyber attack, but added that he did not rule it out.
He defended the FAA’s decision to ground flights nationwide after a system outage, saying it was “the right decision.” However, he said, “this kind of devastation should not have happened.”
Buttigieg told CNN: “Now that we’ve gotten past the immediate outage in the morning, my main interest is to understand exactly how this is possible and what steps need to be taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Buttigieg said federal officials will conduct a review of the aviation system glitch that caused the chaos in air traffic.
“I have directed a postmortem procedure to determine root cause and recommend next steps,” he tweeted.
United Airlines has warned passengers they may continue to see delays and cancellations. The airline also said it would issue travel waivers and offer refunds.
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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