Flights Resume Across U.S. After F.A.A. System Failure
Updates from the New York Times
Updated 4:12 pm - Flights were taking off again Wednesday after an early morning Federal Aviation Administration system failure left pilots, airlines and airports without crucial safety information. The F.A.A. still had not provided a detailed cause of the overnight system collapse, which officials attributed to irregularities. An order to stop all departures across the United States was lifted shortly before 9 a.m. Eastern, allowing normal air traffic operations to gradually resume.
Flight Attendants - Check with your local and MEC communications on the latest for your airline's operations. Make sure you have your contract for rescheduling provisions and more.
Here’s what to know:
More than 8,000 flights within, into or out of the United States had been delayed on Wednesday, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service. The delays were spread across the country and affected multiple carriers.
Passengers across the country said their plans had been scuttled, with airport employees sometimes knowing little more than passengers.
President Biden said that he had spoken with Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, and that he had asked him to report back when a cause for the failure had been identified. There was no evidence of a cyberattack, the administration said.
The F.A.A. said the disruption was caused by an outage to a system that sends real-time safety alerts to pilots, called Notice to Air Mission alerts, which are crucial to planning flights and used to share information about hazards in the air or on the ground. “We are going to see the ripple effects from that, this morning’s delays, working through the system during the day,” Mr. Buttigieg said on CNN. “Now we have to understand how this could have happened in the first place.”
Update 5: 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 ground stop has been lifted.
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023
We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem
