It caused relatively minor inconvenience, but a Federal Aviation Administration computer outage Wednesday morning should prompt plenty of questions and scrutiny.
In the early morning hours, the Notice to Air Missions system went down, grounding flights across the country. According to a report by WHIO, there were 50 fights at Dayton International Airport alone that had been scheduled to depart before 9 a.m. Wednesday, and the delays and ripple effects lasted all day. Thousands of flights were affected — nationally and internationally.
NOTAM sends alerts to pilots regarding conditions that could affect the safety of their flights. It also lets them know whether there are any changes of facility, service or procedure. The FAA says “It states the abnormal status of a component of the National Airspace system — not the normal status.”
In other words, if there’s a problem, NOTAM is how pilots and other essential personnel find out about it.
That’s an upsettingly vital means of communication to be susceptible to a “computer outage.”
In fact, on Wednesday federal officials were reporting there was not any reason to believe the system had been victim to a cyberattack. And by 9 a.m., it seemed as though NOTAM had been restored and flights were resuming.
Now all that is left is figuring out — if the outage was not the result of an outside aggressor — how in the world such an essential system could just blink out, and strand thousands of flights. It also begs the question: Just how vulnerable are we to cyberattacks of this and similar systems, if something internal can create this kind of problem without any outside help?
Federal investigators must not leave any stone unturned in figuring out not only how this “computer outage” happe ..
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