Why have US flights been grounded?
News broke early on Wednesday that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration had been forced to ground all flights causing significant disruption.
Has your flight been postponed? There’s a simple enough reason for that, although at the time of writing, the solution to getting things back up and running does not appear to be as simple.
FAA ground flights after system failure
As soon as news broke about the grounding of the flights due to system issues, rumours of hacking or other nefarious actions spread on social media. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were quick to communicate, saying that its operations were indeed affected by a systems issue, but that it was seeking to reload it.
The FAA is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System. We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now.
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023
Operations across the National Airspace System are affected.
We will provide frequent updates as we make progress.
‘The FAA is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System. We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now,’ the agency said in a post on Twitter. ‘Operations across the National Airspace System are affected. We will provide frequent updates as we make progress.’
A short time after the initial communication, an update was posted advising that 9am ET was the next deadline.
Update 3: The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage.⁰⁰The FAA has ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. Eastern Time to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023
Keep an eye on the FAA’s official Twitter feed for updates.