A US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system outage led to delays at airports across the country because of “ground stops”, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport said on Wednesday.
The FAA said that it was working to restore a system that alerts pilots to hazards and changes to airport facilities and procedures that had stopped processing updated information. “The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system following an outage. While some functions are beginning to come back online, National Airspace System operations remain limited,” it said on Twitter.
Shortly before 8:30am (local time) departures were resuming at Newark and Atlanta airports “due to air traffic congestion in those areas. We expect departures to resume at other airports at 9am ET”.
More than 760 flights were delayed within, into, or out of the US as of Wednesday 6:30am ET, flight tracking website FlightAware showed, without citing the reasons. An additional 91 flights within, into or out of the US were also cancelled.
A ground stop is an air traffic control measure that slows or halts aircraft at a given airport. United Airlines said it had temporarily delayed all domestic flights and it would issue an update when it learned more from the FAA. “Arriving and departing passengers can expect delays this morning and throughout the day,” Austin-Bergstrom International Airport said on Twitter.
President Joe Biden has ordered an investigation into an FAA system outage that grounded flights across the country Wednesday morning and said the cause of the failure was unknown. Biden told reporters at the White House he had spoken to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and they should have a good sense in a couple of hours of what triggered the outage. “We’ll respond at that time,” Biden said. Asked if the outage was caused by a cyber attack, he said, “We don’t know.”
“They don’t know what the cause is,” Biden said. “Aircraft can still land safely just not take off right now. We don’t know what the cause of it is.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier in a Twitter post that there was no evidence of a cyber attack at this time. Shares of US carriers fell in Wednesday’s pre-market trading.
Southwest Airlines was down 2.4 per cent, while Delta Air Lines Inc, United Airlines and American Airlines were down about 1 percent. A NOTAM is a notice containing information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations, but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means. Information can go up to 200 pages for long-haul international flights and may include items such as runway closures, bird hazard warnings and construction obstacles.
