Computer glitch causes delays, cancellations in over 5.5K US flights

Washington: On Wednesday, a computer malfunction in the Federal Aviation Administration's "Notice to Air Missions" system, which transmits safety information to flight crews before takeoff, caused more than 5,000 domestic and international flights to be delayed or cancelled.

Similar to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in India, the FAA is responsible for overseeing US aviation. The FAA reported that departures were starting to resume at many US airports at around 9 a.m. (7:30 p.m. IST) and that the pause it had imposed was being lifted.

Up until the time this report was written, the cause of the outage was unknown.

US President Joe Biden told reporters that he had asked the department of transport, which oversees aviation, to "report directly to me when they find out" the cause.

"They don't know what the cause is, they expect in a couple of hours they'll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time," he said.

The FAA ordered a pause on departures at around 7:00 a.m. (5:30 p.m. IST). Flights already airborne and those coming in to land were exempted.

FlightAware, a website that tracks flights, said that 5,417 flights within, into, or out of the United States were delayed and 2,246 were cancelled.

Industry experts said while operations were being restored, it will be several hours before they return to normalcy.

"Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the US following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted," FAA said in an update on Twitter, adding, "We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem."

These disruptions did not carry over into the defence sector, which operates its own system.

Lt. Col. Devin T. Robinson, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Washington Post that the defence department uses a different system than the one used by the FAA.

With inputs from IANS