US Air Travel Returns To Normal After Technology Breakdown

US air traffic was mostly back to normal on Thursday, a day after a computer system that sent safety alerts to pilots crashed, bringing coast-to-coast traffic to a halt.

About 150 flights were canceled and more than 3,700 delayed on the East Coast by midday, far fewer than on Wednesday when more than 1,300 flights were canceled and 11,000 delayed.

Attention has been drawn to the federal agency where the technical failure appears to have started hours before disrupting more than a million travellers.

The Federal Aviation Administration said a corrupt database file appears to have caused the security alert system to fail. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has promised a thorough overhaul to avoid another major failure.

"Our immediate focus is on development to understand how this happened, why the redundancy and redundancy built into the system was unable to prevent the level of failure we're seeing," Buttigieg told reporters.

Buttigieg said there's no indication the outage was caused by a cyberattack, but officials aren't ruling it out until they know more.

The FAA said on Thursday that a preliminary analysis showed the failure occurred after "a data file was corrupted by personnel who failed to follow procedures."

The massive disruption is the latest challenge from the agency, which accuses airlines of causing the greatest disruption to passengers. Critics, including major airlines and travel companies, say tech agencies are underfunded.

"It definitely requires investment," American Airlines CEO Robert Isom told CNBC. "It will cost billions of dollars and it won't happen overnight."

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has criticized the FAA on a number of issues, including staffing air traffic controllers. He says the agency makes a "heroic effort" and runs well most of the time, but can get overwhelmed during busy travel times.

"They need more investment in technology," Kirby said at a US Chamber of Commerce event in September. - That's what they said.

Rick Larsen, the top Democrat on the Washington state House Subcommittee on Aviation, said the failure shows how weak the FAA's technology is and that the agency needs to make significant improvements.

"It's one thing to do things with old programs," Larsen said in an interview. "Another is to invest in the new software platforms needed to make sure this doesn't happen again."

Former FAA aviation safety officer Mike McCormick, who retired in 2017 after 35 years with the agency, was more confident of the FAA's technology. He said the agency has upgraded IT systems over the past 15 years and upgraded them by 95%, upgrading next-generation satellite systems for navigation, flight tracking and communications.

"The software, the hardware, and the recent upgrades have been completed in the last three years, so now they're actually working on the next generation on top of that and system improvements," said McCormick, who now teaches air traffic control. Embryo. -Riddle Aeronautical University.

The system that generates NOTAMs, or flight alerts, has also been updated, but the failure occurred while an engineer was working on the main system and the database somehow became corrupted, McCormick said, citing FAA discussions with officials.

When they switched to a backup system, its database was also damaged, McCormick said. The system should then restart.

"Things can still go wrong," McCormick said. "You can still have a human error, you can still have a procedural error, you can still have a technological error."

Michael Huerta, FAA administrator from 2013 to 2018, said the systems must be constantly updated to keep pace with evolving technology. Nothing in the FAA's system is old enough to be at risk of failure, he said, especially the system that tracks and communicates with planes.

"We need to convince the public about the safety of the air traffic control system," he said.

But the NOTAM system is nearly a decade old now, with systems reaching the point where vendors no longer support it or the platform it runs on has been updated.

"This is not a one-time event," he said. "It won't be many years before you update it."

The closure comes at an unfortunate time for the FAA and Buttigieg.

The FAA is trying to rebuild its reputation after widespread criticism for how it certified the Boeing 737 Max without fully understanding a flight control system malfunction that played a key role in two crashes that killed 346 people. The agency has taken a more hands-on approach, considering, and possibly refining, Boeing's modifications to get the plane back in the air.

The collapse of the agency, which is overseen by the Department of Transportation, could also undermine Buttigieg's moral authority to condemn airlines for canceling or delaying flights. He's been looking for airlines since last summer, most recently after the Southwest Airlines debacle.

Wednesday's outage showed how much U.S. air travel depends on the computer system that generates NOTAMs.

Before takeoff, pilots and controllers should review messages detailing weather conditions, runway closures, or other temporary factors that may affect flight. The system used to work on the phone, but it was launched years ago.

Buttigieg said when the system went down Tuesday night, a backup system was in place. The FAA attempted to completely restart the main system Wednesday morning but failed, prompting the FAA to take the rare step of preventing the planes from taking off.