FAA outage causes massive air disruption and Biden says they have no idea what happened

by The Right Scoop

This morning the FAA stopped all domestic outgoing flights because one of their systems went down.

It’s estimated that this disruption affected more than 4,000 flights this morning.

Biden says they don’t know why it happened but he’s been on the phone with his Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg trying to get answers.

Here’s more via CNN:

A Federal Aviation Administration-ordered halt to all domestic flight departures across the United States was lifted Wednesday after the system providing pilots with pre-flight safety notices was restored following an overnight outage that caused extensive disruption.

The stop order in place after the failure of its NOTAMS — or Notice to Air Missions — system was lifted by the FAA shortly before 9 a.m. Eastern Time as the agency said normal air traffic operations were resuming across the country. It said it was still trying to determine the cause of the problem.

It was anticipated that some airlines could continue to delay or cancel flights because of ongoing congestion caused by the incident. An airline source familiar with the situation said airlines may implement ground delay programs, which could potentially lead to further timetable issues.

Airlines for America, an association representing US airlines, earlier said the outage was “causing significant operational delays.” Major US carriers including United Airlines, Delta and American Airlines all said had grounded flights in response to the situation.

US President Joe Biden said there was no immediate information on what had caused the outage — the second US aviation crisis in a matter of weeks. He said he had been briefed on the situation and was in touch with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

“I just spoke with Buttigieg,” he told reporters as he departed the White House. “They don’t know what the cause is. But I was on the phone with him the last 10 minutes. I told them to report directly to me when they find out. Aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now.”

He continued, “They don’t know what the cause of it is. They expect in a couple of hours they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time.”

Asked whether it was a cyberattack, Biden said: “They don’t know. They will find out.”

Pete Buttigieg is coming under fire, as this isn’t the first major crisis on his watch.

If you recall, just weeks ago, Southwest Airlines went in meltdown canceling flights which affected thousands of passengers.

Ben Shapiro summed it up this way:

The RNC reminds us that Mayor Pete couldn’t even fill potholes in Southbend:

But hey, at least Trump isn’t president. Right???


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