U.S. aviation authorities halted flights nationwide early Wednesday after the failure of a key pilot notification system operated by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The regulator ordered all airlines to delay departures until 9:30 a.m. Eastern time “to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information,” according to an FAA tweet. The disruption stemmed from problems with the Notice to Air Missions system, or Notam, which conveys urgent advisory information essential for flight operations.
Scores of passengers due to fly domestically began reporting delays on social media earlier Wednesday, and United Airlines Holdings Inc. said it would temporarily ground flights to all destinations. Flight tracking website FlightAware showed 1,230 delays for U.S. flights at 7:22 a.m. Eastern, a figure likely to grow.
The Notam system provides airlines with real-time safety information for flight planning. The U.S. airlines association, Airlines for America, said it’s been notified about the disruptions, and that it’s “working with the FAA and awaiting further information regarding when these issues will be resolved.” Shares of United and American Airlines Group Inc. were both down slightly in premarket trading.
The information conveyed on Notam can be as basic as airport weather and active taxiways or as complicated as temporary airspace closures due to a space launch or presidential travel. Pilots at all stages of training and experience are drilled in relying on the data.
A hotline has been activated, the FAA said on its website. No new Notams or amendments have been processed after the system failed late on Tuesday night, the FAA said, adding that technicians are working to restore operations.
The administration said later that some systems were starting to come back online before it ordered the halt in departures.
The new disruptions follow closely on a December operations meltdown at Southwest Airlines Co. that forced it to cancel more than 16,700 flights and drove the airline to a fourth-quarter loss.
Entry for people arriving at airports across the U.S. descended into chaos in 2019 after a Customs and Border Protection IT system failed, while an outage last August at United Airlines caused disruption across its network.
____
(With assistance from Mary Schlangenstein.)
