All departing U.S. domestic flights were grounded Wednesday morning following what the Federal Aviation Administration said was a failure of a key safety system.
“The FAA is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System. We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now. Operations across the National Airspace System are affected. We will provide frequent updates as we make progress,” the agency said via Twitter at around 6:30 a.m.
“The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage. The 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 agency said not long after.
President Joe Biden, en route to Walter Reed Medical Hospital Wednesday morning to accompany First Lady Jill Biden to a medical procedure, told the White House press pool he had spoken to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about the outage but that he wasn’t aware of the direct cause.
“I just spoke with Buttigieg. They don’t know what the cause is,” The President said, according to pool reporting. “I told them to report directly to me when they find out. Aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now. They don’t know what the cause of it is, they expect in a couple of hours they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time.”
Buttigieg said on Twitter the FAA was working on a fix.
“I have been in touch with FAA this morning about an outage affecting a key system for providing safety information to pilots. FAA is working to resolve this issue swiftly and safely so that air traffic can resume normal operations, and will continue to provide updates,” he wrote.
There is no danger to planes already in the air, according to the FAA.
“All flights currently in the sky are safe to land. Pilots check the NOTAM system before they fly. A Notice to Air Missions alerts pilots about closed runways, equipment outages, and other potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight,” the agency Tweeted shortly after 8 a.m.
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