US lawmakers call FAA outage ‘unacceptable’, demand a fix

WASHINGTON - A group of more than 120 US lawmakers told the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that its computer outage on Wednesday that disrupted 11,000 flights was “completely unacceptable” and demanded that the agency explain how it will avoid future such incidents.

House Transportation Committee chairman Sam Graves and the top Democrat on the panel Rick Larsen said in a Friday letter from committee and other House colleagues to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that they intend to “conduct vigorous oversight of the Department of Transportation’s plan to prevent these disruptions from occurring again”.

Lawmakers want details of what went wrong with a pilot messaging database that led to the first nationwide grounding of departing flights since the Sept 11, 2001, terror attacks.

They want Mr Buttigieg to provide an “estimated cost to commercial airlines and passengers due to the delays resulting from the outage” even though Mr Buttigieg has said the government will not compensate passengers for delays caused by an FAA computer issue.

The House lawmakers also want a briefing and detailed responses to questions including about the causes of the system failure, the FAA’s response to the problem and the redundancy built into the system.

Mr Buttigieg’s office and the FAA did not immediately comment on Friday.

On Thursday, the FAA said its preliminary analysis showed the computer outage was caused by a procedural error related to a corrupted data file. The FAA has not answered questions about the specifics of the problem.

Separately, an aide to Senate Commerce Committee chairman Maria Cantwell on Friday asked the FAA for a briefing by Jan 20 on the outage of the Notice to Air Missions (Notam) database, according to an e-mail seen by Reuters.

The e-mail said acting FAA administrator Billy Nolen on Wednesday held a conference call with airlines advising individual carriers and pilots that they could choose whether or not to fly despite the Notam system outage.

“Why were airlines put in a position where they could have the option of choosing to operate when the Notam system was down?” the e-mail asked.

The Senate committee e-mail also said it appears the groundstop actually lasted from 7.21am ET to 10.06am ET but Mr Buttigieg has said it was lifted after 90 minutes.

“When Secretary Buttigieg tweeted at approximately 8.50am that the groundstop had been lifted, was the Notam system full operational at that point?“

Earlier on Friday, Delta Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian said the incident showed the FAA needs more funding to address legacy computer issues.

The Senate e-mail also asked what additional resources the FAA needed to expeditiously update the Notam system?

The House letter noted the FAA’s most recent budget request included nearly US$30 million (S$39.57 million) to replace “vintage hardware” that currently supports the system that failed.

“Coupled with this 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,” the House letter said. REUTERS