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HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — Wednesday morning delays and cancellations started building up at airports across the country after a computer issue led to a nationwide ground stop.
Thursday, things returned back to normal at the Tampa International Airport, but there has been a lot of frustration for travelers lately.
“I have not flown in 15 years. I hate flying because of this,” Kasey Spangler said.
Spangler spent Wednesday stuck at TPA with multiple flight delays.
“You can’t do nothing with the kids. You have to check the boards because they change the times last minute, so it’s a very big inconvenience,” she said.
ABC Action News dug into what exactly went wrong when the FAA system called NOTAM failed. That system is critical to air travel.
Dr. Yuyu Zhang from the University of South Florida is studying field aviation. She said NOTAM alerts pilots about closed runways, weather conditions or any potential hazards that could impact flights.
“For those who are not familiar with aviation, you can think of it like a work zone notification or some congestion on the roads, and you need to reroute, so that kind of information goes to the pilot,” Dr. Zhang said.
NOTAM is a national system, which is why it impacted the whole country rather than one region. The system communicates with all flights, not just commercial airlines.
“NOTAMS are something that pilots will check before they take off, before they land,” pilot JP Dice said. “It’s something you look at at your destination airport, your departure airport and you’ll look at this information in route.”
He explained it’s text-based information inside the plane that you can constantly check during the flight.
Dr. Zhang said the system failing is a sign it needs to be upgraded.
“The system is kind of old, and it needs to be updated, so inside the infrastructure, both physical and digital need to be updated,” Dr. Zhang said.
Right now, we don’t know what exactly caused the outage.
The FAA released the following statement:
“The FAA is continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage. Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack. The FAA is working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”
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