PremiumInitially, the White House said that there were no evidence of a cyberattack behind the outage that ruined travel plans for millions of passengers.
The United States on Wednesday witnessed air travel chaos as planes were stuck on the ground for hours after a government system used to give pilots safety and other information broke down overnight. Thousands of flights were canceled and delayed across the country.
Initially, the White House said that there were no evidence of a cyberattack behind the outage that ruined travel plans for millions of passengers. President Joe Biden directed the Department of Transportation to investigate, according to The Associated Press.
The outage showed how dependent the world’s largest economy is on air travel, and how much air travel depends on an antiquated computer system to generate alerts called NOTAMs — or Notice to Air Missions — to pilots and others.
Before a flight takes off, pilots and airline dispatchers must review the notices, which include information about weather, runway closures or construction and other information that could affect the flight. The system was once telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for the information, but has moved online.
The NOTAM system broke down late Tuesday and was not fixed until 9 am. Eastern on Wednesday, leading to about 1,200 flight cancelations and more than 7,800 delays by early afternoon on the East Coast, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware, as per AP reports.
Even after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted the order grounding planes, the chaos was expected to linger.
More than 21,000 flights were scheduled to take off in the US on Wednesday, mostly domestic trips, and about 1,840 international flights expected to fly to the US, according to aviation data firm Cirium.
Airports in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta were seeing between 30% and 40% of flights delayed.
Addressing a press conference, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said there was a systems' issue overnight that led to a ground stop because of the way safety information was moving through the system.
“That was resolved, which allowed the ground stop to be lifted at 9 this morning, but through the day we’re going to see the effects of that rippling through the system," Buttigieg said as quoted by AP.
Buttigieg said his agency was now turning to understand what caused the NOTAM system to go down.
(With AP inputs)