Another week and another mishap, however, this one was not caused by any airline or airport. Instead, it was caused by the FAA, the United States authority on commercial and private air travel and rules. This past Wednesday (1/11), all domestic flights were grounded during the morning due to system-wide outages of the FAA’s NOTAM system. The last time all domestic flights were grounded was 9/11. So how does the world’s largest aviation governing body stumble so hard? Also, what the hell are NOTAMs?

Firstly, it must be understood what NOTAMs are and what their importance is. NOTAM is an acronym for “Notice To Air Missions”. Side note and a little history for you, they were only changed from “Notice to Airmen” in 2021. NOTAMs are crucial to air travel, specifically commercial air travel because they give warning to pilots about things like weather, runway conditions, and potential obstructions like birds. Anytime, there is a NOTAM located within 25 nm of a filed flight plan, pilots are given a NOTAM warning so that they can safely operate the plane and/or make changes to flight plans. NOTAMs are extremely common, in fact, there are about 35,000 NOTAMs sent to pilots on any given day. Ok I am done using that acronym.

As the event was occurring on Wednesday morning the FAA announced the issue was “a damaged database file” however, for many this was not a good enough answer. This whole situation comes in light of recent calls for the FAA to modernize their system to a more advanced and specifically more protected system. Cybersecurity and aviation experts both agree that a single database file should not cause the NOTAM system to fail in its entirety. The issue was finally fixed on Wednesday afternoon but now industry leaders and lawmakers are calling for an investigation into what occurred.