Problems with the FAA’s “vintage” computer system were well-known before it crashed, grounding all flights in the United States for about 12 hours.
The Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system crashed on the evening of Jan. 10, 2023, due to a damaged database file, according to FAA officials.
A report from ABC News notes that the crash was caused by an engineer’s error during overnight maintenance, saying he “simply replaced one file with another.”
FAA officials added the crash wouldn’t have happened if the agency’s new NOTAM system had been in place.
The agency has been working for years to update the NOTAM system. In fact, the 2018 FAA reauthorization law required the FAA to modernize the NOTAM system.
“Despite this requirement, the system suffered a complete outage … that led to the first complete ground stop of the National Airspace System since 9/11, impacting thousands of flights and passengers,” noted a Jan. 13 letter sent by 122 members of Congress to Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg seeking answers about the meltdown of such a critical aviation safety notification system.
The letter notes that the FAA’s most recent budget request includes nearly $30 million to “eliminate the failing vintage hardware that currently supports NOTAMs.”
“This shows the FAA was well aware of the issues facing the NOTAM system,” it continued. “Coupled with this week’s failure, significant questions are raised about how long these issues have existed and what is needed to prevent such issues from occurring again.”
The elected officials have asked Buttigieg to provide a briefing to Congress, with “detailed responses to a number of questions about the causes of the system failure, the FAA’s response to the problem, the level of resiliency and redundancy built into the NOTAM system, the age of the system’s software and hardware, any recent or planned FAA updates to the system, impacts of the flight delays and cancellations on passengers, and more.”
Expect to see much more about the modernization of the Air Traffic Control system, as well as the need for more employees throughout the agency, as Congress tackles FAA reauthorization in 2023, when the 2018 reauthorization law expires.
You can read the full letter here.
Does anyone know what vintage hardware was at the root of this outage?
Probably a DEC system.
Curious: Why is it always the current head of any department, no matter how old or new they are in the position, always gets the blame for something going wrong? Nobody automatically knows every thing about any subject. Why can’t we just quit the “blame ” game, fix the problem and go on?
Second, why is the only thing that can “fix” anything is money, and more money? Here is where you can find someone to “blame” and that is the individuals that think they need to be paid big bucks for what little knowledge they have simply because they went to some fancy school that really never taught them anything, and the companies that have a mind set ” government money, hurray, we can charge considerably more for our product” that they can go down to the local Buy-Mart store and get the same thing 10 times cheaper.
Questions: Why wasn’t the system hardware replaced/updated earlier? When did the current system start having hardware issues? Why wasn’t system replacement a priority earlier? Has there been a chronic budget shortfall that basically put us in the current situation, and if so when did congress begin to inadequately fund the FAA so that issues like the one reported are prevented?
I agree with all these comments
I strongly agree with all of you.
Quite right You, both, Mr. Jerry Kemp and Mr. Jerry King, are.
Buttigieg couldn’t organize a one car funeral, much less the Department of Transportation!
He only has that job because he fills all of Biden’s diversity requirements.
This was totally unacceptable on Buttigieg’s part. He is totally incompetent with anything aviation, and probably doesn’t know what a NOTAM is.
MODERN does not necessarily mean BETTER. Be careful what you wish for.
Just a favorite reflection: N E W stands for Never Ever Worked. When was the last time, in these days of customer gets to see if it’s going to work (Beta testing) that something as singular as the faa computer system will come on fully functional…?
I’ve been in IT since the mid-70s getting paid for it and the early 70’s as a student doing programming. I’ve worked at NASA, an international restaurant chain, electric utilities, etc., 4 different computer manufacturers (IBM, AMDAHL, WANG, Digital Systems –NOT DEC).
A few lessons we have learned in doing migrations and conversions. When a new hardware system is sold to replace older technology from a competing vendor (the architectures are NOT the same), what has actually occurred is the entity making this purchase has gotten what we call a ONE OFF Software Development project. Unless you have existing tools to take the data from the one system and convert it to the other system, you have a lot of manual work migrating this. Then, the new system may even be written using a different language. So one needs an automated tool to do that migration — but unless many of these specific conversions are being done, no one invests in a one off migration tool. So you get to do new development on new hardware. And it doesn’t happen over night. Typically takes longer than budgeted. Why? Because new software has to be tested and tested to make sure it meets that functional specs. We saw this same thing going on with IBM and different of their hardware systems. There used to be a web page out there called Boot Hill that listed some of these projects and how much money was spent before the plug got pulled.
But Government entities seemingly go out on bid not realizing or recognizing this problem…. And so you get cost overruns…. Just say’n’.