America’s fragile aviation system
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2023
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
What was behind the sudden halt to thousands of domestic flights yesterday morning? Today on Post Reports, a conversation with transportation reporter Lori Aratani about a highly unusual aviation system failure and the deeper flaws it exposed.
Read more:
More than 4,600 flights arriving in and out of the U.S. faced unusual delays yesterday morning, as aviation staff sought answers to an unexpected overnight outage of its airspace alert system.
Preliminary reviews traced the problem to a damaged database file, but the sweeping stoppage that ensued was something the United States hadn’t experienced since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
This mass grounding of flights also came shortly after a messy holiday travel period: failures at Southwest Airlines prompted more than 16,000 flight cancellations.
Combined, the logjams and stoppages point to a deeper problem with America’s very fragile aviation system, explains The Post’s Lori Aratani.
“This is just another sign of how we need to invest in infrastructure,” Aratani told Post Reports.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | yesterday morning a lot of people at the airport were sitting at the airport expecting |
| 0:06.8 | to hop on an early morning flight to get where they were going only to find out that |
| 0:11.4 | they weren't going anywhere. And the problem was that a key safety system that's operated |
| 0:17.2 | and managed by the Federal Aviation Administration had broken down and essentially they needed |
| 0:24.2 | to reboot and restart it. But until they could do that no flights could depart in the |
| 0:30.8 | US. This is Laura Aratani she covers transportation for the post and just to be clear the fact that |
| 0:37.2 | no commercial flights were allowed to take off anywhere in the country is a really big deal. |
| 0:46.6 | This is an incredibly rare step I think the only other time that this has been done was in |
| 0:52.1 | the wake of the September 11th attacks so it's a very dramatic step but it's one that's very |
| 0:57.4 | focused on ensuring safety. And it has a lot of people asking what happened? |
| 1:05.4 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post this is Post Reports. I'm Martine Powers. It's Thursday, |
| 1:11.4 | January 12th. Today we are going to explain why the FAA took this dramatic step and we're also |
| 1:18.0 | going to talk about how bonkers flying has been recently, the collapse of Southwest over the holidays |
| 1:24.5 | and how all of this points to a deeper problem with America's very fragile aviation system. |
| 1:42.7 | So, Laurie can you explain what is this system that failed and how does it work? |
| 1:46.6 | So, the system that failed is called the Notice to Air Mission System and it's basically a |
| 1:55.0 | system that alerts pilots and crew members to any issues that they might encounter on their flight. |
| 2:02.2 | So, before they take off and they head to their destination and put that plane in the air, |
| 2:07.0 | they need to check the notums and it'll alert them to say say they're flying into Denver airport |
| 2:13.0 | and Denver airport has one runway that's not working. Those pilots need to know that, right? |
| 2:18.9 | This will alert them to any issues that they could potentially encounter on that flight before |
| 2:24.5 | they put that flight in the air. And do we have any idea what caused this failure? |
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