A shutdown of computerswhich grounded passenger aircraft at airports at the All-American level on Wednesday and caused problems for more than 11,000 flightscaused by a procedural error related to a data folder, as announced yesterday, Thursday, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)as the operation of the airlines was normalized.
The FAA announced that its preliminary analysis “indicated that a data folder was destroyed by personnel who failed to follow relevant procedures. The system is working normally.” The FAA did not respond to further questions about the details of the failure that caused the problem.
More than 11,300 flights were canceled or delayed on Wednesday in the first grounding of domestic aircraft in about two decades. As of 7 p.m. ET Thursday, 5,109 flights had been delayed and 163 had been canceled, according to FlightAware. The FAA announced that the cancellations are less than 1% of the flights scheduled for yesterday.
Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, American Airlines Group Inc and Southwest Airlines Co said their operations were normalized yesterday.
The failure of the FAA’s computer system, as reported by APE-MPE, prevented airports from issuing updated flight safety instructions to warn pilots of possible hazards such as runway closures, system outages, but and the execution of works, causing a temporary stoppage of flights.
FAA officials had earlier attributed the problem to a corrupted database file in the system that provides pilots with flight safety updates known as Notices to Air Missions (NOTAMs), however, stressing that no evidence of a cyber attack was detected.
The same file caused a problem in both the main system and the backup, said anonymous imgs briefed on the FAA’s review.
The FAA last year requested $29.4 million from Congress to upgrade its computers, but also to enable it to speed up the organization of a separate storage system for flight safety warnings “and to eliminate the use of technologically outdated software that supports the operation of the US national airspace system.”
“Modernizing the FAA will have a large financial cost, while its cost will have to be covered through a combination of taxes on air travel that affect all airlines, but also the performance of the largest airlines” pointed out the brokerage company Bernstein.
Arjun Garg, a former chief adviser who served as the agency’s deputy commander, said it was too early to draw any conclusions about the incident, saying the agency did the right thing in grounding the flights.
Garg, now a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells, said the incident is a reminder that the FAA has fallen into an annual reimbursement cycle that makes it difficult to plan and implement large multiyear programs such as air traffic control upgrades.
A separate interruption to Canada on Wednesday temporarily blocked the electronic distribution of flight safety updates to pilots, caused by the failure of a single information technology (IT) system, an airport industry img told Reuters.
NAV Canada, the private company that manages Canada’s civil air navigation system, said it was investigating the cause of the problem, which is not believed to be US-related.
Flights in Canada were not affected by the NAV Canada outage, as new flight safety updates can be received or distributed by fax, telephone or regular radio frequencies.
The FAA has been without a permanent commander since March. The Senate has not held a single hearing on President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the FAA. This is Denver International Airport Executive Director Phil Washington. President Biden confirmed his choice in Washington last week.
Senators Jerry Moran and Amy Klobuchar spoke with FAA Acting Administrator Billy Nolen about the outage, and Nolen said “his agency is working to determine the cause of the failure and ensure this does not happen again,” he said. Moran said in a statement.
Shares of American Airlines closed up 9.7% after forecasting higher earnings in the fourth quarter of 2022. Shares of United, Southwest and Delta rose between 2.8% and 7.5%.
Source: News Beast
Bruce Belcher is a seasoned author with over 5 years of experience in world news. He writes for online news websites and provides in-depth analysis on the world stock market. Bruce is known for his insightful perspectives and commitment to keeping the public informed.
