The FAA said its Notice to Air Missions system had “failed” and ordered all domestic takeoffs temporarily halted.
Domestic flights all over the country were temporarily grounded Wednesday morning after the Federal Aviation Administration reported an outage of a system used to notify pilots of important information.
The FAA said in an advisory that its Notice to Air Missions system had “failed” and there was initially no estimate for restoration of the service. The system provides urgent advisory information to flight personnel about things like airport conditions, runway closures and obstacles.
Shortly after 7 a.m. ET, the FAA ordered airlines to halt all domestic departures until 9 a.m. ET to “allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.”
Just before 9 a.m. ET, the FAA announced normal operations “are resuming gradually across the U.S.” and the ground stop had been lifted. It noted it was still looking into the cause of the system failure.
As of 8:15 a.m., 3,578 flights within, into or out of the U.S. had been delayed, and 462 canceled, according to the FlightAware tracker.
United Airlines temporarily grounded all U.S. flights, the airline tweeted. Southwest Airlines — still in reputation recovery mode after a chaotic holiday season full of cancellations — said it was “closely monitoring a data issue with the FAA.”
Delta Air Lines is “safely focused on managing our operation during this morning’s FAA ground stop for all carriers,” the company told HuffPost in a statement. “We will provide more updates about our operation today as soon as we can.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he had been in touch with the FAA. He briefed President Joe Biden on the situation, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.
“There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point,” Jean-Pierre wrote in a tweet. She added that the president has directed “a full investigation into the causes.”
Biden told reporters at the White House: “Aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now. They don’t know what the cause of it is, they expect in a couple of hours they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time,” according to the pool report.
Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas said the outage was causing ground stops there and at other airports throughout the country, and advised passengers to check their flight status before traveling.
Aviation analysts interviewed by MSNBC said that it was highly unusual for the NOTAMS system to not be working.
“For this NOTAMS system to be out, which I don’t ever remember it failing before, and I’ve been flying 53 years … I think the FAA is doing all that they can,” said pilot John Cox.
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