On Wednesday morning, over 11,300 flights were delayed or canceled after a Federal Aviation Administration system failure led to a nationwide grounding order. Mystery and widespread speculation have surrounded the cause of this major incident until now. It has been reported by the FAA that the entire nation’s air travel was halted due to a mistake made by a singular corrupt file.
Air traffic control officials reportedly noticed an issue with their systems late on Tuesday. They tried rebooting the system early on Wednesday morning to disrupt air travel as minimally as possible, however, this reboot process resulted in a nationwide NOTAM failure.
Although the system reportedly came back up after the reboot, it wasn’t functioning at its full capacity, prompting the FAA to issue the nationwide ground stop around 7:30 am on Wednesday.
According to an FAA official, an engineer unknowingly “replaced one file with another,” causing the whole Notice to Air Missions System (NOTAM) to fail for several hours.
“It was an honest mistake that cost the country millions,” reported the official.
On Wednesday night, the FAA reported, “Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time there is no evidence of a cyberattack.”
The damaged file was also found in the backup system.
The agency is still trying to figure out if this corrupted file was a result of one person or a “routine entry.”
The current NOTAM system was installed in 1993 and is responsible for sending pilots crucial information they need to fly, such as issues along their route and at their destination.
The FAA has been working to switch over from its antiquated system to a new, updated NOTAM system which, if already completed, would have prevented the system failure on Wednesday.
This essential update has been put off due to budgetary concerns, according to a source that spoke to CNN.
Unfortunately, the FAA, like many other taxpayer-funded government organizations, prioritizes a woke agenda in their budgets, leaving no room for the essential maintenance and updates to ensure the effectiveness and reliability of the nation’s air traffic control systems.
The effects of the nationwide failure were felt into Thursday as the overwhelmed airlines struggled to get themselves back on track.
