The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States reported that the reason for the massive suspension of flights that occurred on January 11 was the product of human error. air authority ruled out that the failure occurred could be a cyber attack as originally proposed.
The announcement comes as part of the results of an internal investigation by the FAA that found that the cause of the problem was the deletion, by mistake, of a series of essential files for air operations.
“A preliminary FAA review of last week’s outage of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system determined that contract personnel inadvertently deleted files while working to correct synchronization between the main live database and a live database. supporting data”, refers to the report published by the air authority.
To give an idea of the magnitude of the problem caused by the deletion of these files, it should be remembered that During the morning of January 11, all domestic flights in United States airspace were suspended for a few hours. The measure ordered by the FAA to the airlines was intended for the agency to validate the integrity of the flight information it possessed in such a way that they could guarantee their safety.
This is because the A failure recorded that day compromised the system designed to transmit messages from the ground to pilots about risks and restrictions in real time.. In practice, this meant that in the event of an incident, the operators on the ground would not have been able to alert the pilots in time, which in an extreme case could have triggered an accident.
It is estimated that during the hours that the ruling lasted some 3,000 flights were affected due to delays while at least another 100 were canceled..
The FAA indicated that after this incident, the necessary actions were taken to guarantee that the NOTAM system is more resistant and that a situation of this type does not happen again in the future.
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