A Contractor With A Corrupt Software File Brought U.S. Air Travel To A Halt, Per Reports

Two days after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all domestic flights for several hours due to an outage in a critical safety system, questions remain over how it happened.

The outage on Wednesday morning affected the agency’s antiquated Notice to Air Missions system, known as NOTAM. The 30-year-old system provides advance warnings to pilots and flight crews about hazards such as inclement weather and runway closures.

On Wednesday, the agency blamed the outage on “a damaged database file” and by Thursday evening said the file “was damaged by personnel who failed to follow procedures.” The agency has not said whether the incident happened due to human error or malice.

“We need to make sure that there are enough safeguards built into the system that this level of disruption can’t happen because of an individual person’s decision or action or mistake,” Transportation Pete Buttigieg told NBC Nightly News, which reported that at least one of eight contractors with access to the NOTAM system edited the corrupt datafile.

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Wednesday’s outage brought U.S. air travel to a virtual standstill for several hours yesterday and resulted in a whopping 10,578 flight delays and 1,353 cancellations.

On the same day that the United States’ NOTAM system went down, Canada’s own NOTAM system also experienced a brief disruption. Nav Canada, a private non-profit corporation that owns and operates Canada’s air traffic control system, says the incidents are unrelated.

“While we continue to investigate root cause, the issue was related to an isolated IT hardware failure, independent from the issue experienced by the FAA,” said Nav Canada spokesperson Vanessa Adams in an email. “Mitigations were in place to support continued operations and there were no delays associated with this brief outage.”

“Steps have been taken to make sure that the sequence of events that happened Wednesday morning couldn’t happen again,” Buttigieg said.

Many industry experts point out that years of underfunding has made it difficult for the FAA to upgrade infrastructure in a timely way. The agency has operated without a Senate-confirmed director for nearly a year.

In 2021, the Trump administration shaved $3 billion from the agency’s budget, bringing it down to $14.2 billion.

This year, the FAA’s annual budget is $23.6 billion, with $1 billion earmarked for NextGen, the Next Generation Air Transportation System, the ongoing, multi-year program to modernize the agency’s aging infrastructure.

“The FAA is in the process of modernizing its NOTAM system,” according to a staff member for Rick Larsen, ranking member of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. “The current disruption illustrates the need to modernize all corners of the aviation system.”