Beginning late Tuesday night, more than ten thousand flights were impacted by the evening of Wednesday, January 11, as the result of a computer system error at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Including flights into, out of, and within the U.S., nearly 9,600 flights had been delayed by 6:30 p.m., with another 1,300 canceled entirely.
This interruption comes roughly two weeks after the combination of a major storm and air traffic control issues caused thousands of cancellations and delays over the winter holidays.
The FAA, overseen by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, announced on Wednesday morning that it had suffered an overnight outage of its Notice to Air Missions System, the system that allows air traffic control to send pilots warnings about potential hazards and equipment malfunctions on the ground. By 8 a.m., the system was fully restored.
However, even after the system was reinstated, thousands of flights continued to face delays as the earlier disruption cascaded throughout the system.
"Aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now," President Joe Biden told reporters on Wednesday. "They don't know what the cause of it is, they expect in a couple of hours they'll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time."
By Wednesday night, the FAA reported that it had pinpointed the cause of the outage back to a damaged database file. The FAA and the White House have both confirmed that the outage was not the result of a cyber attack.
While the outage may not have been the result of a deliberate attack, critics of the Biden Administration have been quick to point out the weaknesses of the FAA's system. The head of the House Transportation Committee, Missouri Republican Sam Graves, said the interruption "highlights a huge vulnerability in our air transportation system."
"The FAA's inability to keep an important safety system up and running is completely unacceptable and just the latest example of dysfunction within the Department of Transportation," said Republican Senator for Texas, Ted Cruz
Last summer, the FAA's administrator, Trump-nominee Steve Dickson, resigned, and his successor has yet to be confirmed by Congress. Biden's nominee for the position, Phil Washington, has faced pushback and confirmation delays after he was named in a criminal probe into the LA Metro, at which Washington served as CEO. Washington is currently the CEO of Denver International Airport.
Even before its leadership problems, the FAA has been criticized for failing to update its system and employ enough safety specialists to prevent this sort of failure. However, experts say the real problem is with Congress itself: in 2022, the FAA's $18.5 billion budget was actually lower than its budget for 2004 when adjusted for inflation.
