FAA outage that Grounded Flights blamed on old tech and damaged database file

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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/faa-outage-that-grounded-flights-blamed-on-old-tech-and-damaged-database-file/

A Notice to Air Missions system outage that grounded flights across the US yesterday morning seems to have been caused by a damaged database file, the Federal Aviation Administration said last night.

"The FAA is continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage," the FAA statement said. "Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack. The FAA is working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again." Citing an anonymous source, CNN reported that "air traffic control officials realized they had a computer issue late Tuesday" and decided "to reboot the system when it would least disrupt air travel, early on Wednesday morning. But ultimately that plan and the outage led to massive flight delays and an unprecedented order to stop all aircraft departures nationwide."

CNN also wrote that one corrupt file was found in the main NOTAM system, and another corrupt file was found in the backup system.

The source blamed old tech infrastructure. "Because of budgetary concerns and flexibility of budget, this tech refresh has been pushed off," CNN quoted the source as saying. "I assume now they're going to actually find money to do it." Another FAA computer problem in the En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) system caused flight delays at major airports in Florida less than two weeks ago.

On its website, the FAA says it is "modernizing the NOTAM system to improve the delivery of safety critical information to aviation stakeholders," with the goal of "provid[ing] pilots, flight crews, and other users of the National Airspace System (NAS) with NOTAMs that are relevant, timely and accurate." The FAA has struggled to modernize its computer and air traffic operations, a Reuters article pointed out today. "In October, for example, the FAA said it was working to end a long-ridiculed, decades-old practice of air traffic controllers using paper flight strips to keep track of aircraft. But adopting the change at 49 major airports will take the FAA until late 2029," Reuters wrote.

The NOTAM system has given headaches to pilots and other users "who say it overloads them with information that’s irrelevant to their flight and makes it difficult to identify actually useful information," an NBC News report said yesterday.

FAA outage that grounded flights blamed on old tech and damaged database file

Notice to Air Missions outage puts spotlight on FAA's struggles with technology.

arstechnica.com

 

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Thursday that last week's computer system outage that temporarily grounded all U.S. airline departures was caused by the accidental removal of files.

Driving the news: A preliminary review determined that "contract personnel unintentionally deleted files while working to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database," the agency said in a statement.

The big picture: The outage of the system that sends pilots safety alerts and other critical information caused thousands of delays and cancellations and cost airlines billions of dollars.

Details: The FAA, which is still investigating the outage, has so far found no evidence of a cyber-attack or malicious intent, per the agency.

FAA: Outage caused by contract workers unintentionally deleting files

The outage caused thousands of delays and cancellations, costing airlines billions of dollars.

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