US air travel was mostly normal on Thursday, a day after a computer system that sends safety information to pilots crashed and grounded coast-to-coast traffic.
As of mid-afternoon on the East Coast, about 150 flights were canceled and more than 3,700 delayed — figures much lower than Wednesday, when more than 1,300 flights were canceled and 11,000 delayed.
Attention turned to the federal agency where the technology failure apparently began hours before, inconveniencing more than 1 million passengers.
The Federal Aviation Administration said a damaged database file caused the outage in the security-alert system. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised a thorough investigation to avoid another major failure.
Buttigieg told reporters, “Our immediate focus is technical – understanding how this happened, why the redundancies and backups built into the system were not able to prevent the level of disruption.”
Buttigieg said there was no indication that the outage was caused by a cyberattack, but that officials would not rule it out until they knew more.
The FAA said late Thursday that a preliminary analysis showed that “a data file was damaged by personnel who failed to follow procedures.”
The massive disruption was the latest black eye for the agency, which has done business with airlines that have caused more inconvenience to passengers.
Critics, including airline and tourism leaders, say the agency falls short of technology.
“There’s no doubt that investment will be needed,” American Airlines CEO Robert Isom told CNBC.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has been critical of the FAA on a number of issues, including the staffing of air traffic controllers. He says the agency makes “a valiant effort” and does well most of the time but can become overwhelmed during busy travel times.
“They need to invest more in technology,” Kirby said at a US Chamber of Commerce event in September. “That’s what they’re saying.”
Rep. Rick Larson of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House aviation subcommittee, said the outage shows the weakness of the FAA’s technology and that the agency needs to make significant improvements.
“It’s one thing to fix things and keep running on old software,” Larson said in an interview.
Mike McCormick, the former FAA manager of airspace safety who retired in 2017 after nearly 35 years at the agency, was more confident in FAA technology.
He said the agency has modernized computer systems over the past 15 years and is 95% up-to-date after upgrading to next-generation satellite-based systems for navigation, flight tracking and communications.
“The software, the hardware, the last upgrades, were completed over the last three years, so now they’re really working on the generation and enhancement of the system beyond that,” said McCormick, who now teaches air-traffic management at Embry. Is. Paheli Aeronautical University.
The system that generates NOTAMs — or notices to air missions — was also upgraded, but the outage occurred when an engineer was working on the main system and the database somehow became corrupted, McCormick told people in the FAA. Citing said.
When he switched over to the backup system, its database also became corrupted, McCormick said. Had to reboot the system again.
“Things can still go wrong,” McCormick said. “You can still have human error, you can still have procedural errors, you can still have technical errors.”
Michael Huerta, the FAA’s administrator from 2013 to 2018, said the system needed to be constantly updated to keep pace with technology.
Nothing in an FAA system is so out-of-date that it’s at risk of failing, he said, especially the systems that track and communicate with planes.
“The public must have confidence that the air traffic control system is secure,” he said.
But the NOTAM system is about a decade old when the system reaches the point where vendors no longer support it or the platform it runs on has been upgraded.
“This is not a one-time event,” he said.
The outage came at a bad time for both the FAA and Buttigieg.
The FAA is trying to repair its reputation after being widely criticized for the way it played a key role in two crashes that killed 346 people on the Boeing 737 Max without fully understanding its flight control systems. Is. The agency took a more pragmatic approach when considering and ultimately improving the changes Boeing made to get the plane back in the air.
A slowdown in the agency that oversees the Department of Transportation could also undermine Buttigieg’s moral authority to punish airlines for canceling or delaying flights. He’s gone after airlines since last summer, most recently over disruptions at Southwest Airlines.
Wednesday’s breakdown showed that US air travel relies on computer systems that generate NOTAMs.
Before an aircraft takes off, pilots and airline dispatchers should review the notice, which includes details about weather, runway closures, or other temporary factors that may affect flight. The system was once telephone based, but went online years ago.
Buttigieg said when the system broke down on Tuesday night, a backup system went into effect.
The FAA tried to fully restart the main system on Wednesday morning, but that failed, leading the FAA to take the rare step of stopping the planes from flying.
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)