The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced on Sunday that its aviation warning system for pilots is operational again after experiencing a temporary outage on Saturday.
The system, known as the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, can alert pilots before they fly to closed runways, equipment outages, and other potential hazards along a flight route. The FAA said it activated a backup system during the outage, which lasted several hours.
“The NOTAM system is online and operational,” the FAA said in a statement on Feb. 2. “There were no operational impacts in the National Airspace System. We are investigating the root cause of the outage.”
This is not the first time the NOTAM system has experienced an outage. The system also went down in January 2023 – which resulted in the first nationwide ground stop since Sept. 11, 2001, and caused the delay and cancelation of thousands of flights. The outage was quickly attributed to a contractor who unintentionally deleted files.
Since the first NOTAM system failure, the FAA has taken critical steps to mitigate flight disruptions stemming from agency database malfunctions.
For example, the NOTAM system now has a one-hour synchronization delay from the main system to the backup. This means that if bad data breaches the NOTAM database, the backup system will still function properly.
The FAA is still working to modernize the NOTAM system, which dates back to the 1990s. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy joined “Fox News Sunday” to stress the importance of updating this critical system.
“This is an old, antiquated system. It has to be upgraded. That’s in the works. It has been in the works for years. We have to rush this new system online because, again, this is the second time in two years it’s gone down,” Duffy said.
The FAA received a $1.225 billion boost in its fiscal year 2024 budget for help with its staffing and IT modernization work, as well as $3.429 billion for NextGen FAA facilities and equipment.
