Flights resuming after FAA grounds all air traffic
by Pinedale Online!
January 11, 2023
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a ground stop of all flights nation-wide on Wednesday morning, January 11th, following an outage to the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system which provides pilots with important notices and alerts they need before flying. The delay of all departures lasted approximately 90 minutes. Normal operations are slowly resuming as of the time of this report, but delays from the ground stop reportedly created over 10,000 flight delays and more than 1300 flight cancellations.
The FAA issued a statement on Wednesday saying, "The FAA is 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 cyberattack. The FAA is 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 FAA attempted to reboot the NOTAM system early Wednesday morning. When the corrupted files were discovered in both the main system and a backup system, the agency decided it needed to ground flights throughout the country until the situation could be resolved.
The last time all air traffic was grounded in the U.S. was on 9/11, more than twenty years ago when terrorists hijacked multiple airplanes in their attacks on September 11, 2001.
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