A critical US aviation warning system that went down on Saturday has been restored, officials said.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s “Notice to Air Mission,” or NOTAM, system was restored on Sunday morning, as the hitch caused the latest difficulty for the US aviation system in the past week.
The system went down late on Saturday, prompting the agency to set up a hotline to send notices every 30 minutes with updates to airlines.
The NOTAM system provides pilots, flight crews and other users of US airspace with critical safety notices. It could include items such as taxiway lights being out at an airport, nearby parachute activity or a specific runway being closed for construction.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the system was old and needed an upgrade.
“There was minimal disruption,” Duffy told CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “There’s a process in place right now to get this system fixed. We want to expedite that and get this new system in place. This is an old system that needs to be upgraded.”
Duffy had said late on Saturday that the issue could have led to some flight delays on Sunday. FlightAware, a company that tracks flights, said there were 1,133 delays of US flights on Sunday. It is not clear how many were related to the NOTAM outage.
A NOTAM outage in January 2023 led to the first nationwide US ground stop since 2001, disrupting more than 11,000 flights. The FAA said in 2023 it planned to discontinue an older NOTAM system by mid-2025.
According to agency officials, an FAA contractor unintentionally deleted files in the NOTAM system, causing the 2023 outage.
The US aviation system has faced a difficult week.
On Wednesday, an American Airlines passenger jet and a military helicopter collided near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, killing 67 people, the first fatal US passenger airline crash since 2009 and the deadliest US air disaster since 2001.
On Friday, a medical evacuation plane crashed soon after takeoff in Philadelphia with a child and five others on board. All died as did a person on the ground.
