TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) — Planes have returned to the skies Wednesday afternoon after being temporarily forced to ground across the nation and here in the Wabash Valley.
The Federal Aviation Administration reported that the nation’s airports were collectively forced to ground due to an error in the software system all airports use to communicate important information to pilots.
“Our Notice To Air Missions (NOTAM) system is an operating system for the airport. It’s something all pilots have to check before they have to fly at any airport. It’s how we check things like lights, or a part of a taxiway that might be closed, and all pilots have to check before they go to fly,” explained Jeff Hauser, Executive Director of Terre Haute Regional Airport.
While other airports saw more groundings than the Terre Haute Regional Airport, the morning’s gloomy weather helped to prevent more planes from being in the air and needing to be grounded.
“It was a national outage, so all airports had to ground traffic and we did too. Our main ones would have to be the Indiana State University Flight Academy and the Hoosier Aviation Flight School. The students that are out flying, it would have affected them as well. Even if it had been a beautiful day, all the airports, even the big ones like Indy, Chicago, they would still have to ground at that point,” Hauser said.
While the student’s flights were mostly interrupted on a local level, areas across Terre Haute that are important for the airport to keep in contact with were also impacted by the software issue. Hauser referenced the large crane near the site of the future casino as an example of areas in the city that pilots in the area would normally be informed of through the system.
“It took all those out. Everything had to be input again. We haven’t verified it yet, but it seems to be a software issue, but for us, that system makes sure that the airport is in working order,” Hauser said.
The cause of the software system failure was determined to be a damaged file, explained in a couple of Tweets from FAA’s official account:
“We are continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage. Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack. (1/2) We are working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again. (2/2)”
@FAANews 6:31 p.m. Jan. 11, 2023
