The United States faces, this Wednesday (11), a major interruption in all flights in the country.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency responsible for American civil aviation, ordered the suspension of all domestic flight departures after the system that provides pilots with pre-flight safety warnings went down.
The FAA said in a statement that it had ordered airlines to suspend all domestic departures until 11:00 am (GMT) while it tried to restore the NOTAMS system. ”).
“We are performing final validation checks and repopulating the system now,” the FAA said in a separate statement earlier on Wednesday.
“Operations throughout the National Airspace System have been affected. We will provide frequent updates as we progress,” he added.
Speaking to reporters this Wednesday morning in Washington, US President Joe Biden said he had spoken with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
“They still don’t know what the cause is. But I was on the phone with him. I told them to report directly to me when they found out. Aircraft can still land safely, they just can’t take off right now,” Biden said.
“They don’t know what the cause is. They hope that in the next few hours they will have a good understanding of what caused it and will respond,” she added.
The association representing US airlines, Airlines for America, says the outage is “causing significant operational delays”.
United Airlines said it temporarily delayed all domestic flights.
American Airlines said in a statement that it is “closely monitoring the situation, which affects all airlines, and working with the FAA to minimize disruption to our operations and customers.”
The NOTAMS system, which is facing the outage, provides “critical flight safety operation information”, says the airline.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg posted on Twitter: “I reached out to the FAA this morning about an outage affecting an important system for providing safety information to pilots. The FAA is working to resolve this issue quickly and safely so air traffic can resume normal operations and will continue to provide updates.”
FlightAware, which tracks delays and cancellations, showed nearly 1,200 flights to, from and within the United States delayed as of 8:45 am GMT, but just 93 canceled flights.
Commercial airline pilots use NOTAMS to obtain real-time information about flight risks and restrictions.
The FAA stipulates that NOTAMS alerts should not be considered the sole source of information, and therefore, some flights may meet safety requirements using other data.
Source: CNN Brasil
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