FAA has announced changes to prevent repeat of system failure
2023.01.30 12:46
FAA has announced changes to prevent repeat of system failure
By Kristina Sobol
Budrigannews.com – The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) informed lawmakers that it had implemented a number of changes to prevent another computer system failure, which occurred on January 11 and prevented more than 11,000 U.S. flights from operating.
In a letter dated Friday and seen by Reuters on Monday, acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen stated that the agency had implemented a modification to the system to prevent a corrupt file from causing damage to a backup database.
The FAA informed lawmakers last week that contractor employees who accidentally deleted files from the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) database had been denied access to a pilot messaging database.
According to Nolen’s letter, attempts to restore those files contributed to the outage, and the FAA has since implemented a one-hour delay in database synchronization, which should prevent data errors from immediately reaching the backup database.
Additionally, the FAA stated that:
“now requires at least two individuals, including one federal manager, to be present during the maintenance of the NOTAM system.”
Earlier, Reuters reported some of the upgrades. The first nationwide groundstop of departing flights since the al Qaeda attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, was carried out by the FAA.
Pilots, flight crews, and other air traffic controllers in the United States receive critical safety alerts from the NOTAM system.
According to the FAA’s letter, the NOTAM System is made up of two interdependent systems: the 30-year-old legacy U.S. NOTAM System and the more recent Federal NOTAM System, which it called the foundation for the ongoing modernization effort.
Two additional backup databases are situated in Atlantic City, New Jersey, while the primary database and a backup database are situated in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
“The legacy U.S. NOTAM System is scheduled to discontinue by mid-2025,” the FAA stated when it began modernizing the NOTAM system in 2019. The NOTAM system modernization’s second phase is expected to be finished in 2030, according to the letter.
The FAA stated that three assessments of the system have been carried out since 2020, the most recent of which took place in October.
