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Aviation leaders call for more funds for FAA after this week’s system failure : NPR


Passengers check-in at Southwest Airlines self-service kiosks at Midway Airport in Chicago as delays stemming from a computer outage at the Federal Aviation Administration sent flights across The United States stalled on January 11.

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP


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Charles Rex Arbogast/AP


Passengers check-in at Southwest Airlines self-service kiosks at Midway Airport in Chicago as delays stemming from a computer outage at the Federal Aviation Administration sent flights across The United States stalled on January 11.

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

CHICAGO — Following this week’s computer system crippling incident, aviation industry leaders are calling on Congress and the White House to better support and fund the Federal Aviation Administration’s efforts to modernize their outdated technology.

Aviation safety advocates and industry experts say there were warning signs long before the NOTAM system hit on Tuesday night prompting the FAA to impose a nationwide halt for about 90 minutes. for all flights departing on Wednesday morning, causing thousands of delays and cancellations throughout the year. day.

NOTAMs, or Notices for Aviation Mission, are notifications that warn pilots of potential hazards along their flight path from the time they return from the gate until they reach their destination.

Mark Zee, a former commercial airline pilot and air traffic controller, said: “NOAM is basically a little message to pilots to say, ‘Hey, your flight is up to something today. something different you need to know about it'”. live in New Zealand.

He said the warnings could be crucial, telling pilots that a certain taxiway or runway was closed or that part of the airspace was closed due to military aircraft drills. But he says NOTAM can be pretty trivial, such as maybe there’s a team mowing the lawn on an airport, setting off fireworks along their route, or an unimportant light going out.

And Zee says the volume of messages is so great, especially when flying transcontinental or overseas routes, because the longer the flight, the more NOTAM the crew will receive.

“For a long-haul flight, say a 10-hour flight, you know, maybe from Paris to Bangkok, you get 1200 of these messages. And the problem is in 1200 messages. That said, only one or two or three would be pretty important. You really need to know these. But the other 1,197 aren’t really relevant at all.”

Adding to the problem is the way the NOTAMs are laid out – all caps, with lots of acronyms and abbreviations in a way that can look like confusing gibberish to the untrained.

“It was a mess,” Zee said. “That’s a great word to describe it. It’s a mess. It’s a huge mess,” adding that it was “an outdated, outdated information system from the years gone by. 1920 and as a result they frequently miss important flight information.”

Zee heads an international organization called activity group, whose members include airlines, pilots, air traffic controllers and other aviation stakeholders. The group is working with aviation authorities globally to reform the NOTAM system.

But the issues he’s unraveling are long-standing and really have nothing to do with this week’s tech infrastructure failure of the FAA’s NOTAM delivery system.

The FAA has worked to computer system upgrade for years “to improve the delivery of critical safety information to aviation stakeholders.”

The Department of Transportation called the system “faulty vintage hardware” in its budget request last year, when the agency asked for $29 million for a program that would expedite its replacement.

According to many industry stakeholders, this is just one example of how the agency has struggled to obtain adequate, stable and consistent funding for a critical technology upgrade.

“I think it is clear that there must be a call to action between our political leaders, Congress and the White House, to fund and properly provide the FAA with the resources it needs to do its job. jobs,” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Friday on a conference call with reporters and analysts announcing the company’s fourth-quarter and year-end financial results.

“I think this is a clear example of the challenge the FAA has faced, where when you have legacy systems that aren’t as resilient as they should be, you have somewhat outdated tools and technologies. and you have the qualifications of personnel nowhere. they need to be,” Bastian said.

Bastian added that modernizing the nation’s air traffic control system and other FAA technologies is critical to the safety of the aviation industry and its ability to meet projected growth.

“I know the FAA is doing the best they can with what they have, but we need to get behind the FAA,” Bastian said. “We need to remove them from the annual funding that they seem to be regularly going through political negotiations with and realize how important it is to have a strong aviation infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, a group of 120 members of Congress is demanding answers from Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the FAA about the system failure.

The lawmakers, led by new House Transportation Committee Chairman Sam Graves, a Republican from Missouri, and Rick Larsen of Washington Democrat, the committee’s minority leader, called Computer outages forced the cancellation of more than 1,300 flights on Wednesday and delayed nearly 11,000 more. , “completely unacceptable.” They want Buttigieg and FAA officials to explain what caused the computer failure and the steps being taken to prevent it from happening again.

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