FAA chief tells Senate that new procedures will avoid repeat of outage that halted U.S. flights

Federal Aviation Administration acting Administrator Billy Nolen told a Senate panel Wednesday that caller procedures volition debar a repetition of the outage that prompted it to halt to departing aerial traffic past period for the archetypal clip since the Sept. 11, 2001, violent attacks.

The Senate Commerce Committee proceeding comes amid increasing information concerns astir aviation information aft respective adjacent calls involving large U.S. airlines. Nolen said successful a memo connected Tuesday that helium is starting a safety review squad and called a gathering of commercialized and wide aviation leaders adjacent month.

Wednesday's sheet centers connected an outage connected Jan. 11 of the Notice to Air Missions system, oregon NOTAM, which provides information alerts to pilots specified arsenic icy runways and different hazards. The strategy failed erstwhile a contractor unintentionally deleted files during an update, the FAA has said.

"After the incident, we implemented a synchronization hold to guarantee that atrocious information from a database cannot impact a backup database," Nolen said successful prepared remarks up of the hearing. "Additionally, we person implemented a caller protocol that requires much than 1 idiosyncratic to beryllium contiguous and engaged successful oversight erstwhile enactment connected the database occurs."

The FAA halted departing flights due to the fact that of the outage for astir 2 hours, but delays lasted passim the day, conscionable weeks aft Southwest Airlines vacation question meltdown successful the aftermath of a terrible wintertime storm.

Nolen is apt to look questions from senators connected the caller adjacent calls betwixt craft successful New York and Austin, Texas. On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board said it is investigating what occurred connected a United Airlines formation that plunged and past recovered soon aft departing from Maui's Kahului Airport successful Hawaii connected Dec. 18.

United didn't instantly remark connected the incident, which was archetypal reported connected Sunday by The Air Current.