On Wednesday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that America’s airspace was shut down for several hours across the US.
The FAA is the largest transportation agency of the U.S. government that oversees many aspects of America’s aviation, including air traffic management.
The issue affected the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which provides pilots with real-time information about closed runways, equipment outages, and other potential hazards.
More than 7,000 flights were delayed after the outage.
“The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage. The FAA has ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. Eastern Time to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information,” FAA announced.
Buttigieg brushed off the systems shut down during an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday.
“Glitches and complications happen all the time,” Buttigieg said.
FAA and the White House said there was no evidence of a cyber attack, but they can’t say what caused the entire system to go down.
“We are continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage. Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack,” FAA said.
“We are working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again,” the post continued.
On the same day, Canada’s NOTAM system was also hit with an “outage.”
“NAV CANADA’S Canadian NOTAM entry system is currently experiencing an outage affecting newly issued NOTAMs, and we are working to restore function. We are not currently experiencing any delays related to this outage. We are assessing impacts to our operations and will provide updates as soon as they are available,” NAV Canada announced.
According to NAV Canada, the country’s air navigation service provider, they believed the outage was not related to the FAA outage in the US.
“NAV CANADA continues to investigate the cause of the outage; at this time, we do not believe it to be related to the FAA outage experienced earlier today.”
It is not just US and Canada, The Gateway Pundit reported that the same event happened in the Philippines on New Year’s Day when all international flights were rerouted when the country’s airspace collapsed owing to technical issues.
This is very alarming.
Reuters reported:
Philippine authorities halted flights in and out of Manila on New Year’s Day due to a malfunction of air traffic control, which also prevented airlines bound to other destinations from using the country’s airspace.
A total of 282 flights were either delayed, cancelled or diverted to other regional airports, affecting around 56,000 passengers at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA), the airport operator said on Sunday.
It was unclear how many overflights were affected.
Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista apologized for the inconvenience to passengers as he blamed a power outage for the breakdown of the central air traffic control system that also affected operations at other airports in the country.
He said the outdated existing facility should be upgraded immediately and that a back-up system was also needed.
“This is air traffic management system issue,” he said in a media briefing. “If you will compare us with Singapore, for one, there is a big difference, they are at least 10 years ahead of us.”