Thousands of flights have been grounded across the US after the Federal Aviation Administration’s IT system suffered a “major failure”.
The NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system, which keeps pilots and other airport staff updated about aviation hazards and airport facilities, has stopped processing information as of Wednesday morning.
The FAA said there was no nationwide ground stop, but confirmed the NOTAM system was down, with engineers currently working on the issue.
“The FAA is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System. We are performing final validation checks and repopulating the system now,” said a spokesperson for the FAA.
“Operations across the National Airspace System are affected.
“We will provide frequent updates as we make progress.”
The FAA describes NOTAM as as system which “indicate[s] the real-time and abnormal status of the NAS (National Air Space) impacting every user”.
It notifies both pilots and airport and ground staff of military exercises affecting airspace, obstacles close to airfields, and closed runways and taxiways among other incidents.
Aviation analyst Alex Macheras told The Independent: “NOTAMs are essential for the safe continuation of global air travel. These essential notices and directives ultimately keep the world’s aviation sector, specifically flight crew and all personnel concerned with flight operations, informed and up to speed with latest air travel related directives, operational updates, security, weather and warnings.
“With a system failure affecting NOTAMs, operations will be disrupted almost immediately and this will soon be felt elsewhere across the world, including for flights waiting to depart to the US.”
On Twitter Mr Macheras predicted: “Flights will be unable to resume until [the system failure is] resolved.”
FlightAware data shows that at least 400 flights have been delayed into, out of or across the United States as of 5.31am ET, CNBC reports.
Airports including Austin-Bergstrom, Milwaukee International, Kansas City and Philadelphia International all posted alerts to social media warning that flights would be subject to delays and cancellations throughout the day,
FlightRadar24 showed aircraft turning back towards the US mainland following the announcement of the outage.
Aviation figures said there was no way to know how soon the issue would be rectified.
Passengers reported sitting on the tarmac for hours, with many airports’ schedules thrown into disarray.
“Coming up on the three hour mark of sitting on a grounded red eye flight from @flyLAXairport, with still no publicly available update from @FAANews… love it,” tweeted Taylor Brasher.
“Nationwide FAA computer outage has grounded flights this morning! Here’s hoping we get to Disney!” wrote Alexis Uremovich on Twitter.
Meanwhile, US data scientist DJ Patil tweeted: “Anyone one else stranded? Our @united says there is a nation wide outage of FAA @FAANews computer systems.”
Followers of Mr Patil replied confirming they were stranded or delayed at San Francisco, Washington Dulles, Los Angeles, Honolulu and Milwaukee, among other hubs.
One air traveller claimed they were delayed in Madrid as a result of the US disruption.
