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Evidently the U.S. NOTAM system failed at around 7am this morning. Subsequently all commercial airline flights were grounded till it could be restored. Why? You can't dispatch an airplane if you don't know if the airport you are flying too is open, whether airspace is open or closed, or a number of other equipment or systems are operating.

One example, If the firefighting capabilities of an airport are degraded because of equipment failure, you might not be able to land at that airport since it no longer satisfies the AARF requirements for the size of your airplane.

Another example would be the failure of a single ILS airport if the weather made it necessary or it was being used as a destination alternate.

The bold is mine.

Biden addressed the FAA issue Wednesday before leaving the White House. He said he had just been briefed by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who told him they still had not identified what went wrong.

"I just spoke to Buttigieg. They don’t know what the cause is. But I was on the phone with him about 10 minutes," Biden said. "I told him to report directly to me when they find out. Air traffic can still land safely, just not take off right now. We don’t know what the cause of it is."

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/faa-outage-white-house-says-no-evidence-cyber-attack-biden-briefed-grounded-flights


Well that gives me the warm and fuzzies!! Super Butt is on the case!!! How about tossing the FAA some of that infrastructure money you're sitting on Pete? Replace the Commodore 64 computers they are using.

Also, with power grids, hospitals, and numerous businesses being cyber attacked, how are they so sure so quickly it wasn't a cyber attack?

Even if it is a cyber attack, they will never say it and do their absolute best to have their media suppress it.

Southwest holding the FAA's beer...

We had a bunch of flights during the failure. It was really fun reading them all the pertinent NOTAMs one at a time.

Almost as fun as when I had to replace every instance of "Airmen" with "Air Missions" in our library to avoid offending the pastel flaggers.

Lucas wrote:

Almost as fun as when I had to replace every instance of "Airmen" with "Air Missions" in our library to avoid offending the pastel flaggers.

I don't buy into political correctness when it comes to traditional names of things. For example, Congresswoman is nothing but a manufactured social kowtow of Congressman. Liz Cheney called herself a Congressman. So did and do a few other female members of the House. That's the traditional term and using it is not intended to slight women.

NOTAM is another. The FAA looks petty for changing Notice to Airmen to Notice of Air Missions. Besides, like Lucas said, it just creates putzy busy work to update old files.

According to the FAA it was a corrupt file inserted during a routine maintenance of the system that caused the crash.

“The FAA is continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (notam) system outage,” said the agency in a statement. “Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack. The FAA is working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2023-01-12/faa-blames-damaged-database-file-notam-system-outage

I can actually believe that. How many times has MSFS2020 done an update that resulted in unexpected problems leading to the "update" having to be removed or fixed?

Mark wrote:I don't buy into political correctness when it comes to traditional names of things. For example, Congresswoman is nothing but a manufactured social kowtow of Congressman.

Gotta play catch up Mark, it's quickly becoming "Congressperson" cause you know man and woman don't take into account gender fluidity!

DXing wrote:

Mark wrote:I don't buy into political correctness when it comes to traditional names of things. For example, Congresswoman is nothing but a manufactured social kowtow of Congressman.

Gotta play catch up Mark, it's quickly becoming "Congressperson" cause you know man and woman don't take into account gender fluidity!

DXing wrote:How many times has MSFS2020 done an update that resulted in unexpected problems leading to the "update" having to be removed or fixed?

Every...single...update.

At my previous job, the contractor responsible for maintaining the control and CCTV system learned, quickly, that they need to have at least one of their techs on-site when it came time to push an update.

Lucas wrote:We had a bunch of flights during the failure. It was really fun reading them all the pertinent NOTAMs one at a time.

Almost as fun as when I had to replace every instance of "Airmen" with "Air Missions" in our library to avoid offending the pastel flaggers.

I didn't realise it had changed (not sure it has in the UK) until I saw a news report on it as I was in New York at the time.

Incidentally, a lot of money has been spent on replacing railway rulebook sections over here simply so the word 'pilotman' is replaced with 'pilot'. There have also been attepts to replace the 'secondmans' seat in the cab with the 'assistants' seat, but even female colleagues call it secondmans.

DXing wrote:Gotta play catch up Mark, it's quickly becoming "Congressperson" cause you know man and woman don't take into account gender fluidity!

"Congresscritter" is nicely gender- and species-neutral.