What caused the flight stoppage?
I’m looking for all you pilots and retired pilots to weigh in on this.
But here’s the official story:
Flights across the United States resumed Wednesday morning, several hours after the Federal Aviation Administration suffered a computer outage that forced it to halt all departures nationwide while it scrambled to resolve the issue.
The FAA said the crippling delays that affected thousands of flights appear to have been caused by a problem in the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which sends pilots vital information they need to fly.
Investigators have seen no evidence of a cyberattack, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.
Don’t they have some sort of backup system? Or was that affected too? Or did they need to find out whether it was a cyberattack before they lifted the ban? Better to err on the side of caution, though.
The following is almost humorous, except that it’s not:
President Joe Biden ordered an investigation after he was briefed on the situation by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Do either of them have a clue what they’re talking about here? What in Buttigieg’s background qualifies him for this job?
On the other hand – as someone pointed out in a comment I saw the other day – Buttigieg has the distinction of giving the transportation secretary job such an unusually high profile that it’s one of the rare times that so many people actually know who the Secretary of Transportation is.
Another observation:
Meanwhile, the top Republican on that committee, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said the “FAA’s inability to keep an important safety system up and running is completely unacceptable and just the latest example of dysfunction within the Department of Transportation.”
I saw that bit about Buttigieg briefing Biden and laughed out loud. Probably an extreme version of the Telephone game. I’m sure the IT people had already tried to make the explanation simple. But it must have been like giving a message in Turkish to a guy who doesn’t speak Turkish and having him relay it to another guy who doesn’t speak Turkish who may or may not try to relay it to the press.
Joke see on Twitter:
‘Peter Buttigieg is so bad at his job, people know who the Secretary of Transportation is.’
Re: Backup systems: They almost certainly exist. They also are often not well tested and / or require skilled people to activate and switch over. And if the error happened during a planned upgrade (my horror stories: 1) bad setting during installation in backup facility deleting production database. 2) Another time, was cleared to begin upgrade in backup facility (took like 4-6 hours), then prod failed, so no stable systems were available …) well, these things can happen.
Then again, if there were a ‘credible threat’, this is also a pretty plausible response. As well as having the ‘credible risk’ being a dry run to validate the expected response … Games within games.
So far I can’t find any information about the specific cause. Evidently Buttigieg himself isn’t “prepared to rule out” a cyber attack. It’s a little worrying that we still don’t have a solid explanation after this amount of time.
Buttigieg isn’t prepared to handle anything to do with transportation on land, sea, or air.
Please see my comment in the Open Thread. Besides the questions raised above, generally a lack of NOTAMs are not something, from my own experience, that should cause a nationwide shutdown. Unless, somehow, the NOTAM system is also linked to filing IFR flight plans…. All very strange to me, so anyone with more light to shine, please respond.
Oh, BTW, NOTAMs was originally an acronym for Notice to Airmen, but due to gender discrimination was changed to Notice to Air Mission.
Sorta reminds me of a common practice on soccer fields of players from the same team yelling “man on!!” when an opposing player is coming up from behind an unsuspecting teammate. My daughters, who have played soccer since they were 4 and now 28 and 26, laughed when it was suggested that for female players it should be “woman on”. They said by the time they shouted out that mouthful it would be a done deal…and they weren’t in least offended by the term.
On Twitter, the great Jesse Kelly observed that it’s hard to tell who’s worse, Kamala or Pete, because “they both suck.”
That’s just comedy gold right there, I don’t care who you are.
physicsguy, NOTAMs are linked to filing IFR flight plans. NOTAMs for FIR/UIR are needed to determine routing and a pilot may need to have information related to ILS systems at the arrival and alternate airfields. In a typical commercial departure briefing file, NOTAMs may take ten or more pages (approximately half) of the briefing package. Some system would be needed to compile those NOTAMs. Still, knowing that information; I do not know why a nationwide ground stop would be necessary.
Buttigieg isn’t prepared to handle anything to do with transportation on land, sea, or air.
The longer you contemplate Buttigieg, the more he looks like an ambulatory resume. All on paper, no real skills.
Their current employer likely wouldn’t be happy, but maybe the FAA should hire half a dozen folks from the nearest Chik Fil A.
The longer you contemplate Buttigieg, the more he looks like an ambulatory resume. All on paper, no real skills.
He does know how to maximize his use of private jets: https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/buttigieg-took-government-jet-for-single-day-trip-to-new-york-report/ar-AA16aW9n
Their current employer likely wouldn’t be happy, but maybe the FAA should hire half a dozen folks from the nearest Chik Fil A.
I’ve seen comments elsewhere to the effect that if Biden had to have a gay person as Secretary of Transportation, he should have looked for one with work experience in logistics for UPS or FedEx. Those companies can’t afford to fool around.
Who’s the most incompetent person in this adminstration? Tough call:
Kacklin’ Kami?
Mayorkas?
Buttboy?
Granholm?
The black gay immigrant?
Yellen?
he was picked because biden stole the iowa primary from him, or sanders I forget, and his father was a marxist translator in malta,
you forgot the non binary luggage stealing nuclear expert, his contratemps was also hidden for months,
What could cause a nationwide stop? Every FAA center has backup power, computers, and radars. Comms are backed up as well.
The airways used by the airlines are based on positive control of the aircraft from takeoff to landing. So, all the component parts are interwoven to keep traffic moving. And they have worked quite reliably for many years.
NOTAMs are notices of various information about airports, warning areas, ILS systems, approach plate changes, runway closures, etc. My airline found the NOTAMs that applied to our trip and attached them to the flight papers. Occasionally, as in the case of an ILS system being inop, our minimums for approach at that airport would be higher. It could affect our fuel planning and our alternate airport selections. NOTAMs are important and can affect flight safety. So, if that system failed, it could be a reason to delay operations until it was back online. How a system like that, which has operated flawlessly for all these years, could suddenly fail should be looked into. It’s hard to believe they don’t have backups built in like everywhere else in the system.
The airways are a very important part of our transportation infrastructure. Covid seems to have taken a toll on it. The airlines were bleeding money for two years and lost a lot of experienced people to retirement or attrition. Now, they’re deluged with demand and don’t have the people to meet that demand. Also, it seems that Southwest didn’t use their government grant money to revamp and speed up its computer system. Big mistake. There are probably other such mistakes that will be revealed over the next couple of years.
The FAA may be experiencing some of the same personnel problems as the airlines. Or some of their computer systems may need updating. It may take a while to find all the weak points that may have developed.
I get my FAA info from @blancolirio on YT:
https://youtu.be/ib79qWWMOcc
If a pilot can’t see his NOTAMs, he can’t fly.
Whatever it was, something just like it happened in Canada at the same time.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/canada-flights-system-outage-grounded-b2260500.html
I wonder if there are any parallels to the Southwest Airline failure, which as I understand it, was the consequence of depending on the inter-communication integrity of software systems that were written decades ago. And I also wonder whether this could, in part, be the product of old software that has now been rendered vulnerable because of the speeds of modern communication systems – the rollout of 5G and so on. It’ll be interesting to hear what the root causes are.
@ Aggie > “It’ll be interesting to hear what the root causes are.”
Delayed Y2K effects.
The Government is always behind the times.
Relevant posts:
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/heres-what-the-faa-has-been-focused-on-instead-of-keeping-planes-in-the-air/
When and why the acronym NOTAM was changed from Men to Mission.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/01/loose-ends-201.php
The segment on NOTAMs is at the end, but don’t miss the Buttigieg memes along the way.
newlangsyne….”Whatever it was, something just like it happened in Canada at the same time.”
That is extremely weird. It would make sense that the NOTAM system outage in the US would impact flights going *between* Canada and the US, but from the link it sounded as if Canada-only flights were also impacted.
I wonder if there is a contractor-managed NOTAM system that serves both countries, or perhaps they’re both hosted at the same data center. Both of these theories seem unlikely, though.
NOTAMs are important: they are used, for example, to announce restricted airspace (Biden in Wilmington or at Camp David, for instance), military GPS testing that impacts reliable GPS availability in an area, outages of various ground-based navigation beacons, etc. Depending on the procedures followed by an airline or other operator, the pilot may get so many of them that the important ones get lost in the noise, though.
ArtDeco said:
“Buttigieg isn’t prepared to handle anything to do with transportation on land, sea, or air.
The longer you contemplate Buttigieg, the more he looks like an ambulatory resume. All on paper, no real skills.”
Heh, heh!
That reminds me of a popular comment, well it’s more likely a snub, that was popular with my college buddies:
“He’s a guy from NATO!…No Action, Talk Only!”
😀