Senators grilled the pinnacle of the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday, searching for solutions after a string of security incidents and an FAA pc outage that triggered the cancellation of 1000’s of flights have renewed considerations over the security and reliability of air journey.
Almost one week after the Southwest vacation meltdown listening to, appearing FAA head Billy Nolen testified earlier than the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation concerning the pc outage that led the company to difficulty a floor cease.
The incident halted all air site visitors for the primary time because the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults. It additionally adopted a spate of security incidents which have garnered nationwide headlines — and have caught the eye of the committee.
“These incidents are concerning,” commerce committee chair Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., stated on the listening to. “They impact Americans’ confidence in our aviation system, and our aviation system infrastructure is critical to American safety and security.”
Nolen advised the Senate panel in ready remarks that the FAA carried out a set of latest protocols to make sure such an incident doesn’t occur once more. He additionally urged Congress to speculate extra within the FAA’s modernization efforts.
Some of those protocols embody “a synchronization delay to ensure that bad data from a database cannot affect a backup database” and guaranteeing multiple particular person is “present and engaged in oversight when work on the database occurs.”
On Jan. 11, the FAA experienced a Notice to Air Missions — the alert system pilots use — outage resulting from a contractor unintentionally deleting recordsdata throughout an replace. The outage led to the delay of 1000’s of flights, solely two weeks after Southwest canceled virtually 17,000 flights.
The NOTAM outage spurred criticisms over the FAA’s antiquated know-how, a few of which depends on 30-year-old infrastructure and software program, in line with Nolen.
Nolen additionally shared that the FAA is considerably ramping up its efforts to interchange its outdated NOTAM system due to the outage, aiming to utterly substitute the system by 2025.
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At the listening to, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the rating member of the Senate commerce committee, grilled Nolen over the FAA’s incapacity to modernize and the outdated NOTAM system.
“The FAA ordered a full ground stop of the national airspace system for the first time since Sept. 11, which was 22 years ago,” Cruz stated. “The ground stop was because America was under attack. But this time, this ground stop was the result of the federal agencies’ inability to modernize.”
Nolen stated he couldn’t assure that there’ll by no means be one other difficulty with the NOTAM system following the Jan. 11 outage.
“What I can say is that we’re making each effort to modernize and take a look at our procedures,” provided Nolen.
Nolen additionally addressed the latest slate of near-miss airplane incidents which have occurred in the course of the previous few months.
On Jan. 13, a Delta Air Lines airplane almost collided with an American Airlines plane at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK).
Then, at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS), Southwest and FedEx planes had been almost 100 ft away from colliding as each planes tried to make use of the identical runway for takeoff and arrival.
Cruz performed a simulation of the close to collision between the Southwest and FedEx planes at AUS on the listening to, emphasizing that the incident might have been deadly.
“If you were sitting on that Southwest flight, and you knew how close you came to having a plane land on top of you, killing every person on that plane, you would be horrified,” Cruz stated.
In December, a United Airlines flight that departed from Maui got here inside 800 ft of plunging into the Pacific Ocean en path to San Francisco, which was first reported by The Air Current.
The National Transportation Safety Board is at the moment investigating the near-miss incidents, and the FAA shaped a workforce of consultants to conduct a complete evaluation of airline security, in line with Reuters.
Against that broader backdrop, Nolen took the chance to plug the security document of business aviation within the U.S., although he acknowledged that sustaining that isn’t a given.
“We are experiencing the safest period in aviation history, but we do not take that for granted,” Nolen shared. “Recent events remind us that we cannot become complacent and that we must continually invest in our aviation system.”