Flights start to resume after FAA outage. What’s the Notice to Air Missions system?
Flights are resuming across the United States after the Federal Aviation Administration said an outage crippled domestic air travel.
The FAA stopped grounding flights after thousands were impacted on Wednesday, Jan. 11. The agency said it paused all outbound domestic flights due to a problem with its Notice to Air Missions system (NOTAM).
“Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews,” the agency wrote on Twitter. “The ground stop has been lifted. We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem.”
The agency previously said it was pausing U.S. departures until 9 a.m. eastern “to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.”
What is the Notice to Air Missions system?
“A NOTAM is a notice containing information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means,” the FAA said on its website, adding that the system uses special phrasing to make communication easier.
“Pilots check the NOTAM system before they fly,” according to the FAA. “A Notice to Air Missions alerts pilots about closed runways, equipment outages, and other potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight.”
The alerts had been called Notices to Airmen but were changed to Notice to Air Missions in 2021 to be “inclusive of all aviators and missions,” the FAA said.
The system “sends out important real-time hazards to all commercial airline pilots,” telling them when and where it’s safe to take to the air and return to the ground, according to United Airlines, which was among the domestic carriers affected.
Meanwhile, the nation’s largest carrier, American Airlines, said in a tweet that it was “working with the FAA to minimize customer disruptions.”
Thousands of flights impacted
Across the nation, more than 600 flights were canceled and over 4,300 delayed, according to the website FlightAware.
For example, the website showed Charlotte-Douglas International Airport was experiencing average departure delays of 1 hour and arrival delays of 1 hour and 26 minutes as of about 9 a.m. The transportation hub advises “passengers to check with their flight status before coming to the airport,” The Charlotte Observer reported.
“The President has been briefed by the Secretary of Transportation this morning on the FAA system outage,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, wrote on Twitter. “There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point, but the President directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into the causes.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
This story was originally published January 11, 2023 at 7:45 AM.
