Due to a widespread technical issue, the Federal Aviation Administration has ordered airlines to halt all domestic departures until 9 a.m. ET on Wednesday.
The FAA’s NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system, which alerts pilots and other personnel to airborne problems and other delays at airports across the country, failed, resulting in the outage. According to the FAA website, “the NOTAM outage continues with no current projected time of restoration.”
“The FAA is repairing the Notice to Air Missions System. The system is currently being repopulated as final validation tests are completed.” The FAA stated in a statement.
According to the statement, “National Airspace System operations remain constrained, despite the fact that some functions are beginning to return online.”
The early Wednesday system failure had already caused the majority of carriers to ground their own aircraft. FlightAware reports that the malfunction has resulted in the cancellation of 400 flights across the United States. More than 1,150 domestic, international, and transit flights were also delayed, according to the flight tracker.
United Airlines has decided to ground all of its aircraft until 10 a.m. ET due to the disruption.
The incident occurred about a week after the FAA slowed all aviation activity in Florida due to an air traffic problem earlier in January. That failure was caused by En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) at airports across the state.
