By Oyintari Ben
Flights across the country restarted Wednesday, many hours later, after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) experienced a computer outage on Tuesday night, forcing it to suspend all departures across the country while it scrambled to fix the problem.
The Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which provides pilots with the critical information they need to fly, is believed to be the source of the catastrophic delays that grounded thousands of aircraft, according to the FAA.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre indicated that investigators had not found any proof of a cyber attack.
President Joe Biden ordered a probe after receiving a briefing from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
The Senate Commerce Committee, which supervises the FAA and is chaired by Democratic senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, said it will also look into the situation.
“Safety is the top priority,” added Cantwell in a statement. “We will be investigating what led to this outage and how redundancy contributes to preventing subsequent outages as the Committee gets ready for FAA reauthorization legislation. The general public requires a reliable air transportation network.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the committee’s senior Republican, stated that the FAA’s failure to maintain a critical safety system is “absolutely unacceptable” and “simply the latest evidence of dysfunction within the Department of Transportation.”
The delays happened only a few weeks after Southwest Airlines disrupted travel by cancelling more than 2,500 of its flights over the Christmas holiday.
Around 8:50 a.m., the FAA lifted the ground halt, and normal air traffic operations gradually resumed. However, there was already a backlog of planes and a swarm of disgruntled passengers in airports around the nation at that point.
According to the online flight tracker FlightAware, more than 7,300 domestic, international, and transatlantic flights were delayed as of noon. The list of cancelled flights included more than 1,100.
