Our lives are in your hands, and you have butterfingers?
The US Federal Aviation Administration says its preliminary investigation of last week’s system outage that caused the first nationwide grounding of flights since September 11, 2001, has uncovered the cause: contractors accidentally deleted some essential files.
Oops.
In its first word on the outage since January 11, the day the FAA’s Notice to Air Mission Systems (NOTAM) went offline, the agency said contract personnel were working to correct a synchronization issue between the live primary database and a backup copy. In the process, some incorrect keys were apparently pressed and more than 11,000 flights were grounded.
NOTAMs are notices of changes that may affect flight plans, like construction, weather or other emergencies. Pilots on long-haul flights can be stuck reading through hundreds of pages of NOTAMs before taking off; in short, they’re pretty essential.
The outage last week was relatively brief, and only saw flights due to take off in a roughly three-hour window delayed or canceled before the FAA said everything was restored at 0900 Eastern Time.
