FAA System Outage Grounds ALL US Planes, What Does This Mean For The Kalamazoo Area?
More than 8,000 US flights have been delayed today due to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) outages. The FAA has a system known as NOTAM, which stands for Notice to Air Missions, which allows the FAA to communicate with pilots about their surroundings and what that could mean for air safety.
Due to these outages the FAA could not notify pilots of hot air balloons, construction, or other variables that all affect flight patterns and if ignored could lead to danger. As of Wednesday afternoon, 8,609 flights within, into or out of the United States were delayed and 1,251 were canceled, according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Although the ground stop order was lifted by the FAA Wednesday morning the damage had already been done. Thousands of flights had been cancelled or delayed and it would take them some time to get up and running in normal air traffic operations.
This wasn't necessarily the only step that could've been taken when the NOTAM system went down but it was one of the safest as U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the dramatic nationwide ground stop of departing flights was out of an "abundance of caution."
Southwest, who already had a system failure of their own happen over the holidays causing mass cancellation and delays on their flights, was hit hard on Wednesday by the system outage with 377 canceled flights. Nearly 400 flights as of midday Wednesday were cancelled by American, plaguing them as the most affected.
Kalamazoo Keeping it Chill
They haven't said anything about the FAA outages on their social pages and have instead encouraged residents to start booking their trips out of AZO for this year! I would assume that air traffic is slowly returning to normal and that may be a reason for the lack of information about the FAA outages.