Thousands of flights blocked in the United States: how are the investigations proceeding?

Despite the investigation ordered by Joe Biden’s government into the causes that led to a total paralysis of US airspace it is still in its initial statethe first guesses of the experts suggest that the chaos erupted because of outdated technology in the air control systema recurring issue which they say will be looked into more closely after this incident.

USA TODAY consulted several experts, who agreed that the technology used by the FAA needs urgent update.

“I hope this is a wake-up call for Congress to provide more desperately needed funding to modernize the air traffic control system,” said Laurie Garrow, a civil engineering professor specializing in aviation at Georgia Tech.

Arjun Garg, a member of the law firm Hogan Lovells and former lead counsel to the FAA, said the agency’s technology is often complex and often outdated due to ups and downs in funding cycles of public administrations.

“The lack of stable funding during the government’s budget allocation period greatly hampers the ability to make these kinds of upgrades,” he explained, adding that added that the FAA “has one more hurdle”as your system needs to run reliably every day and you need to be able to do those updates while still running.

what happened on wednesday

Thousands of flights were grounded or delayed on Wednesday morning after a computer glitch affected the Air Mission Notification System (NOTAM), the computer system that compiles and distributes safety information to pilotsas reported by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA, for its acronym in English).

The system has been around for more than half a century, and has gone from being a database built on physical media to being a computer system. It is being updated.

Although the government ruled out that it was a cyber attack from the start, President Joe Biden has asked the State Department to start an investigation to determine exactly what the causes of the failure were.

What is the NOTAM

These are collections of essential information before the flight for pilots and air traffic controllers, including details on possible adverse weather conditions along the wayairport runway changes and closed airspaces to be avoided.

Warnings began to be issued in 1947, modeled after a system used to warn mariners of dangers at sea.

A pilot cannot legally take off until he has reviewed the information. John Hansman, a professor of aeronautics at MIT, explains that most airlines subscribe to services that collect NOTAM information from the FAA and package it for each flight.

The airline dispatch centers then pass it on to the pilots. In this case, the services could not obtain the information because the FAA system malfunctioned.

what went wrong

The FAA said preliminary indications indicate “a corrupted database file”. The agency said it would take steps to prevent another similar outage.

The system went offline on Tuesday at 8:28 pm EST, but since there weren’t many starts at that time, the pilots were able to receive the information verbally. By dawn in the East, the system was still down, and there were too many outbound flights to report to individual pilots.

It is likely that the main system had a problem and the file the backup will not work properly. The FAA restarted the main system around 5 a.m., but it took some time to verify that all the information was validated and available, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explained.

So the FAA ordered a halt to all flights Wednesday morning and the planes were grounded for hours.

“This was done to make sure that messages were transmitted correctly and that security information was working as it should,” Buttigieg explained.

Aviation experts they did not recall an interruption of this magnitude throughout the FAA system caused by a technological failure.

What was the government’s response?

Buttigieg said the NOTAM system is constantly being updated, but one key issue is find out if it is obsolete.

“We won’t let anything happen that isn’t safe,” Buttigieg said. “This is exactly why our focus right now is to understand, identify and fix everything about the root cause of how this happened in the first place.”

Rep. Sam Graves, a Republican from Minnesota, said the NOTAM malfunction was inexcusable, targeting the Department of Transportation and the FAA for their “inability to maintain and operate the air traffic control system properly.”

Graves, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said the FAA It has been almost a year without a permanent manager. He said he expects a full briefing on the disruption.

Source: AP and USA Today

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