U.S. Flights Were Grounded Because Of One Man’s Mistake, Official Says

According to a new report, an engineer was blamed for the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) NOTAM System crash that stopped all domestic plane departures on Wednesday morning.

According to a senior FAA official ABC News Thursday that systems monitoring of the NOTAM system was at an urgently high level as a result of Wednesday’s debacle.

An engineer “replaced one file with another” The official claimed that the engineer made the error during routine scheduled system maintenance on Wednesday morning.

The FAA official also noted that Canada’s NOTAM system was disrupted Wednesday, although it remains unclear as to whether the problem was linked to the American failure. Canada was not forced to ground its flights and the official said Canada’s system is more modern.

Thursday was a long day of flight delays due to NOTAM failures on Wednesday and Thursday. Over 600 flights from the U.S., into or out, were delayed. More than 80 flights were canceled on Thursday morning. The Wall Street Journal reported.

The OPSGROUP is an industry group that has been criticizing NOTAMS since years. “We communicate the most critical flight information, using a system invented in 1920, with a format unchanged since 1924, burying essential information that will lose a pilot their job, an airline their aircraft, and passengers their lives, in a mountain of unreadable, irrelevant bulls***,” a 2017 blog post from the group said.

International Civil Aviation Organization, (ICAO) is Directed and funded 193 national governments have pledged support for their diplomacy, cooperation and air transport. Noted There are many notifications and coordination that must be done to ensure air traffic flows smoothly in 2021.

“On any given day, there are some 35,000 active NOTAM circulating in the global air transport system. In 2020, the total number of NOTAM issued exceeded 1.7 million. … It is not uncommon for a pre-flight briefing package supporting a long-haul international flight to contain more than 100 pages of NOTAM information. Findings have shown that twenty percent of these will be old NOTAM, exceeding their three-month applicability period,” the group wrote. 

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