Davids Demands Answers from FAA on Major Outage
Representative Sharice Davids joined a bipartisan group of Members on the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee in seeking answers from Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) about last week's meltdown of a key aviation safety notification system.
Last Wednesday, the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system suffered a complete outage that led to the first complete ground stop of the National Airspace System since 9/11, impacting thousands of flights and passengers.
Davids and her colleagues wrote, "Over the past year, there have been a series of flight delays and mass cancellations that have caused considerable harm to passengers. While not all of these events have been within the agency's control, at least some have been due to the FAA's apparent issues with managing the agency's air traffic control legacy systems. The failure to improve legacy systems is unacceptable, and the American people expect and deserve better."
The 2018 FAA reauthorization law required the FAA to modernize the NOTAM system, and the agency's most recent budget request included nearly $30 million to "eliminate the failing vintage hardware that currently supports [NOTAMs]."
Davids further states in the letter that, "This shows the FAA was well aware of the issues facing the NOTAM system. Coupled with [last] week's failure, significant questions are raised about how long these issues have existed and what is needed to prevent such issues from occurring again."
Specifically, the letter requests that Secretary Buttigieg provide a briefing to Members as well as detailed responses to their questions about the causes of the system failure, the FAA's response to the problem, the age of the system's software and hardware, any recent or planned FAA updates to the system, impacts of the flight delays and cancellations on passengers, and more. This builds on Davids' actions last week with her Transportation and Infrastructure Committee colleagues to hold airlines accountable for massive delays and cancellations over the holiday travel season.