Caused by a corrupt file in the computer system, an outage led to massive flight delays and an unprecedented order to halt all domestic flights in the United States.
Grounding all domestic flights at once for several hours in the United States is a first! Yesterday, the FAA, the American civil aviation, blocked all air traffic in the country until 3 p.m. (French time). This decision was taken following a breakdown of the computer system which made it possible to display the Notam. These Notam, acronym for Notice to air missions, deliver essential information to pilots to ensure the safety of a flight throughout their navigation.
Yesterday, while Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was still working on the reasons for this giant failure, it already indicated that the decision to stop the flights was not due to a cyberattack. Today, the organization was able to trace the reasons for this incident: it would be due to a simple corrupted file in the database. Originally, when the air traffic controllers understood that there was a problem with the system that delivers the Notams, they decided to restart it at the best time so that it did not cause security problems. This procedure takes approximately 90 minutes.
A budgetary problem
As a precaution and to start on a sound basis, they then injected a backup of the system to reset it. But, since the “bugged” file was also in the backup, the failure persisted, which caused the flights to stop. The time to restore a healthy version of the system, the air traffic controllers therefore had to deliver the flight information directly by radio messages.
For services managing air traffic, the cause of this concern comes from budgetary restrictions. The Notam system was to be modernized, but the implementation of this update has been postponed. As a result of the consequences of this major outage, the requested investments are expected to be granted during the Congressional vote on the FAA grant budget to be held this year.
Caused by a corrupt file in the computer system, an outage led to massive flight delays and an unprecedented order to halt all domestic flights in the United States.
Grounding all domestic flights at once for several hours in the United States is a first! Yesterday, the FAA, the American civil aviation, blocked all air traffic in the country until 3 p.m. (French time). This decision was taken following a breakdown of the computer system which made it possible to display the Notam. These Notam, acronym for Notice to air missions, deliver essential information to pilots to ensure the safety of a flight throughout their navigation.
Yesterday, while Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was still working on the reasons for this giant failure, it already indicated that the decision to stop the flights was not due to a cyberattack. Today, the organization was able to trace the reasons for this incident: it would be due to a simple corrupted file in the database. Originally, when the air traffic controllers understood that there was a problem with the system that delivers the Notams, they decided to restart it at the best time so that it did not cause security problems. This procedure takes approximately 90 minutes.
A budgetary problem
As a precaution and to start on a sound basis, they then injected a backup of the system to reset it. But, since the “bugged” file was also in the backup, the failure persisted, which caused the flights to stop. The time to restore a healthy version of the system, the air traffic controllers therefore had to deliver the flight information directly by radio messages.
For services managing air traffic, the cause of this concern comes from budgetary restrictions. The Notam system was to be modernized, but the implementation of this update has been postponed. As a result of the consequences of this major outage, the requested investments are expected to be granted during the Congressional vote on the FAA grant budget to be held this year.
