The Federal Aviation Administration’s Notice to Air Missions system, or NOTAM, is on the fritz. Travelers are paying the price.
NOTAM is a warning system that gives pilots important updated flight information. Planes aren’t flying blind without it, but its operation helps to avoid a multitude of problems.
SOUTHWEST AIRLINES MASS CANCELLATIONS PARTLY CAUSED BY OUTDATED SOFTWARE
The FAA discovered there was a bug in the warning system on the night of Jan. 10 and attempted a full reboot to fix the problem. That did not go well. The next day, Jan. 11, more than 10,500 flights “within, into, or out of the United States yesterday” were delayed, according to the tracking website FlightAware.
This was blown up by many websites with charges that it constituted the biggest travel disruption since the national no-fly order from Sept. 11, 2001. Technically, all commercial flights were grounded, but briefly. For comparison, two days prior, when there were no problems detected, the number of flights in the same category delayed was just over 4,100.
Many travelers scrambled to rebook flights at a time when there was not a great deal of slack in the system to deal with a spike in cancellations.
Transportation policy experts tried to figure out what this meant, with little initial definitive information from the government.
Brandon Pugh is a policy director in cybersecurity for the R Street Institute think tank as well as a pilot. On the day of the shutdown, he told the Washington Examiner that he wasn’t happy with the answers he was getting.
“Unfortunately, I am not clear on the exact cause of this outage, and the FAA only states they ‘will continue to look into the cause of the initial problem,’” Pugh said. “This alone is concerning because we are not clear on what led to this widespread disruption, even hours later.”
For its part, he explained, “The White House said they have seen no evidence of a cyberattack and have ordered an investigation. However, the outage from today shows the potential a cyber incident could have on aviation and the country. For example, if an ‘outage’ of this system alone results in delays and aircraft being grounded, a far worse outcome could result if a cyberattack was used.”
Putting on his pilot cap, Pugh added, “The NOTAM system provides valuable information to pilots, so clearly, a backup system and plan is critical for the future to help prevent this.”
William McGee, a senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, said that is going to take more money.
“While the causes of this morning’s outage of the critical NOTAM system are still being determined, one thing has long been true: The FAA is chronically underfunded and does not have all the resources necessary to adequately support our national aviation system,” he said in a statement.
That purported lack of funds is a “direct result of efforts by the airline industry and their allies in government to starve an essential agency,” he said, adding that he hoped a “thorough investigation” would help to “determine whether underfunding contributed to this morning’s latest crisis and to inform a long-overdue national conversation about the state of commercial aviation in the U.S.”
Marc Scribner, transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, did not immediately agree that a tech failure at the FAA should mean the agency gets a larger share of the federal pie.
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“Until the NOTAM system failure point or points have been identified, it is premature to recommend an appropriate response,” he said. “However, FAA’s inability to deploy key elements of NextGen air traffic control modernization over the last 15 years on time and on budget is a well-known problem and suggests serious reform is necessary.”
Scribner argued that “peer countries have adopted international governance best practices and then leaped ahead of the U.S. on air traffic control modernization,” and thus, the new Congress ought to “consider structurally separating the provision of air navigation services from FAA to eliminate a well-known institutional conflict of interest that is stifling innovation in U.S. air traffic control.”
