It appears that a “damaged database file” was at the root of a Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage that grounded all domestic flights in the U.S. Wednesday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
At around 6:30 p.m. ET, the administration said that a “thorough review” of the outage was being conducted and that preliminary work pointed to the corrupt file. There is no evidence of a cyberattack, the 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,” said the administration.
“The FAA is still trying to determine whether any one person or ‘routine entry’ into the database is responsible for the corrupted file,” said a government official familiar with the investigation, per CNN.
According to an unnamed source cited by the outlet, air traffic control officials identified a computer issue around 3 p.m. ET Tuesday. It was related to the central database for the 30-year-old NOTAM system, which advises pilots of issues along their route and at their destination.
“It’s been around for a long time,” CBS Travel Editor Peter Greenberg told News Talk 830 WCCO’s Chad Hartman this week. “It’s essential before a plane can be dispatched. To give the pilots real time information on conditions and hazards on the airports they are flying to.”
Air traffic officials came up with a plan to “reboot the system when it would least disrupt air travel, early on Wednesday morning,” a process that takes around 90 minutes, said CNN’s sources. It also has a backup that officials switched to when they noticed problems with the main system.
A corrupt file was found in the main system and in the backup system, sources told the outlet.
During the reboot process, the system came back up, but it “wasn’t completely pushing out the pertinent information that it needed for safe flight, and it appeared that it was taking longer to do that,” said the CNN sources.
At around 6:30 a.m. ET Wednesday, the FAA tweeted that it was “working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System,” and “performing final validation checks and reloading the system now.”
Less than an hour later, the FAA announced that it “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.”
CNN said the order was “unprecedented” and Greenberg noted that there has been another time when the FAA grounded flights.
“The last time they did anything close to that, it was actually more severe, of course. It was Sept. 11, 2001,” he said.
A little after 8 a.m. ET Wednesday, the FAA announced that all flights currently in the sky were safe to land. Normal operations were resuming within the hour.
According to CNN, Congress is expected to address agency funding this year when the five-year FAA Reauthorization Act signed in 2018 expires.
“The problem is Congress can allocate money, but the way the FAA moves, they take such a slow time in testing and improving a system that by the time they would actually implement it, that system would be outdated already,” said Greenberg. “We’re talking for seven or eight years.”
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