The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has revealed the cause of a systems outage that on Jan. 11 led to a ground stop of thousands of flights and disrupted air travel across the United States.
The FAA has been probing the reasons behind the failure of a key pilot notification system operated by the agency since it went down earlier this month and caused disruption to over 11,000 flights.
The agency announced on Jan. 19 that its preliminary review of the matter indicates that contract staff “unintentionally deleted files” when transferring data between databases, leading to the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage.
The snag took place when personnel were working “to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database,” the FAA said. …