NOTAM System Glitch Causes Airspace Shutdown in America

January 13, 2023

America’s airspace shut down for several hours Wednesday morning following a glitch in a computer system used to send alerts to pilots. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said that its Notice to Air Missions system, or NOTAM, had failed and was not processing new information. The system, which dates to the middle of the last century, gives pilots real-time updates on flight conditions. According to the FAA’s website, NOTAM communicates “information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations, but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means.”

When was NOTAM created?

Air traffic operations started using NOTAMs in 1947, according to FAA documents. At the time, the notices were modeled after the Notice to Mariners, which advised ship captains about hazards on the seas. When it was created, the air-notification system was called “Notice to Airmen.” It was renamed to the more inclusive “Notice to Air Missions” late last year. NOTAMs used to be telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for the information, but have now moved online with the advent of the internet.

What kind of information does a NOTAM deliver?

According to the FAA, a NOTAM includes “abnormal” information about the status of airspace. Alerts can convey a range of details including time, airport, location and descriptions of a hazard, obstruction or service. To pack in so many details, the notification system uses specialized abbreviations that can be parsed by computers. Those abbreviations are set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which oversees global air travel. If there is no appropriate ICAO term, “plain language” is used in the NOTAM, according to FAA.

Information conveyed in NOTAMS can range from the mundane to the critical. Messages “may include items such as runway closures, general bird hazard warnings or low-altitude construction obstacles,” Reuters reported. For long-haul international flights, NOTAMs can run up to 200 pages, according to the wire service.

When did the NOTAM system go down?

According to an FAA advisory, the NOTAM failed Tuesday night, at 8:28 p.m. Eastern Time. Its failure prevented new or amended notices from being sent to pilots, the Associated Press reported. The FAA resorted to a telephone hotline to keep departures flying overnight, but as daytime traffic picked up it overwhelmed the telephone backup system, according to the AP.

Has the NOTAM system failed before?

Longtime aviation insiders told the Associated Press they could not recall a technology breakdown causing an outage on this scale. “Periodically there have been local issues here or there, but this is pretty significant historically,” Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines and now a consultant in Minneapolis, told the AP. John Cox, a former airline pilot and aviation safety expert, told the wire service that the scale of the problem suggests a “catastrophic failure.”

The FAA is currently investigating the cause of the failure and working to restore the system. In the meantime, the FAA is using other means to communicate flight conditions to pilots, such as telephone hotlines. The incident highlights the importance of NOTAM system and the need to ensure its reliability and security in order to avoid disruptions and ensure the safety of flights.

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