Washington, Jan. 11 (BNA): US flights are slowly beginning to resume departures and a ground station has been lifted after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) scrambled to fix an overnight system outage that halted all US departures.
The cause of the problem, which has delayed thousands of flights in the United States, is not clear, but US officials said they have not yet found evidence of a cyberattack, Reuters reported.
“Normal air traffic operations are gradually resuming across the United States following the overnight outage of the Notice to Air Missions system providing safety information to flight crews. The ground hold has been lifted. We are still investigating the cause of the initial problem,” the FAA said in a tweet.
More than 4,300 flights have been delayed and 700 canceled as officials say it will take hours to recover from the grounding.
The FAA had earlier ordered airlines to pause all domestic flights after the pilot alert system malfunctioned, and the agency had to perform a hard reset around 2 a.m., officials said.
Shortly before 8:30 a.m., departures resumed at Newark and Atlanta airports, the FAA said.
The FAA is expected to implement a ground delay program in order to address the flight backlog of hours. Flights have already been allowed to continue to their destinations during the ground stop.
US President Joe Biden ordered the Department of Transportation to investigate the outage and said the cause of the failure is not known at this time. Asked if a cyberattack was behind the outage, Biden told reporters at the White House, “We don’t know.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg pledged a “follow-up process to identify root causes and recommend next steps”.
The FAA said it was working to restore an air mission notification system that alerts pilots to risks and changes to airport facilities and procedures that stopped processing updated information.
FlightAware, a flight-tracking website, showed that a total of 4,314 US flights were delayed as of 9:04 a.m. ET. Another 737 were cancelled.
United said it had resumed operations. However, the Chicago-based carrier warned that customers may still see some delays and cancellations.
US airline stocks fell in pre-market trading on Wednesday. Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) fell 2.4%, while Delta Airlines (DAL.N), United Airlines (UAL.O) and American Airlines (AAL.O) fell about 1%.
“America’s transportation network is in dire need of major upgrades… We call on federal policymakers to modernize our critical air travel infrastructure.” said Jeff Freeman, president and CEO of the American Travel Association, a group that represents American airlines, hotels, rental car companies and theme parks.
The FAA outage comes weeks after an operational meltdown at Southwest at the end of last year, stranding thousands of passengers.
A severe winter storm right before Christmas coupled with the Texas-based carrier’s dated technology led to more than 16,000 flight cancellations in the past month.
DOT, the FAA’s parent agency, has been highly critical of Southwest’s failures and pressured the airline to compensate passengers for missed flights and other related costs. There is no legal requirement for the FAA to compensate passengers for flight delays caused by the agency’s computer problems.
A NOTAM is a notice that contains basic information for personnel involved in flight operations, but is not sufficiently known in advance to be disseminated by other means.
The information can be up to 200 pages long for long-haul international flights and may include items such as runway closures, warnings of bird hazards, and construction obstructions.
United Airlines (UAL.O) said it has temporarily postponed all domestic flights and will issue an update when it learns more from the FAA.
Germany’s Lufthansa and Air France said they were continuing to operate flights to and from the United States, while Air France said it was monitoring the situation.
The operator of Paris’ two international airports – Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and Orly Airport – said it expected flight delays.
Austin Bergstrom International Airport said on Twitter that ground stops across the country were causing delays. A ground stop is an air traffic control procedure that slows or stops aircraft at a particular airport.
In an earlier advisory on its website, the FAA said its NOTAM system had “failed,” though NOTAMs issued before the outage were still viewable. Earlier this month, a problem with a different airline’s computer control system delayed dozens of flights in Florida.
Data from Cirium showed that 21,464 flights are scheduled to depart from airports in the United States on Wednesday, with a capacity of approximately 2.9 million passengers.
Cirium data showed that American Airlines had the highest number of departures from US airports with 4,819 scheduled flights, followed by Delta and Southwest.
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