FAA system outage halts departures of all domestic US flights | Business and Economy News

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BREAKING,

US President Joe Biden is ordering an investigation into the problem causing delays across the US, the White House says.

Plane departures within the United States are halted until at least 9am EST (14:00GMT) due to a problem with a system used by pilots, according to US authorities.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Wednesday that it was working to restore a system which alerts pilots to hazards and changes to airport facilities and procedures and which had stopped processing updated information, known Notices to Air Missions, or NOTAMs. The glitch has led to hundreds of flight delays in the US.

US President Joe Biden had been briefed on the matter and has asked the US Department of Transportation to investigate the causes, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a tweet.

“There is no direct evidence of a cyberattack at this point,” Jean-Pierre tweeted.

However, Biden later told reporters he had spoken to US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

“They don’t know what the cause is,” he said. “I told him to report directly to me when they find out. Air traffic can still land safely, just not take off right now.”

Buttigieg said in a tweet that he is in touch with the FAA and monitoring the situation.

There are arrival and departure delays at airports across the US affecting at least 3,700 flights, according to tracking website FlightAware. More than 670 have been cancelled, and that number continued to tick up Wednesday morning.

In a tweet, the FAA said that all flights currently in the sky are safe to land.

“We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now,” the FAA said. “Operations across the National Airspace System are affected.”

The agency said after 8am ET that some departures were resuming at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey and Atlanta Airport in Georgia.

Before commencing a flight, pilots are required to consult NOTAMs, which list potential adverse impacts on flights, from runway construction to the potential for icing. The system used to be telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for the information, but has now moved online.

More than 21,000 flights were scheduled to take off in the US Wednesday, mostly domestic trips, and about 1,840 international flights were expected to fly to the US.

Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said the US military flights were not impacted because the military has its own NOTAMS system separate from the FAA system, and the military’s system was not affected by the outage.



Sumber: www.aljazeera.com

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