Only a few weeks ago, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg roasted Southwest Airlines for problems that led to thousands of canceled flights. Yet Mr. Buttigieg was no model of contrition recently after airlines were grounded nationwide by a mega-meltdown at the agency he oversees, the Federal Aviation Administration.
“This is an incredibly complex system,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “Glitches or complications happen all the time.” Those are words of great comfort, no doubt, to any travelers who missed grandma’s funeral. The cause of the fiasco was a failure in the FAA’s clunky decades-old Notice to Air Missions (Notam) system. Notam gives alerts to pilots before they take off, for example, if taxiways are closed for maintenance.
But a systemwide crash is not a glitch. At first the FAA resorted to a telephone hotline to keep planes flying, but this backup quickly became overwhelmed. That morning the FAA grounded all flights while it rebooted Notam.
Some airlines, including JetBlue and Delta, believed that operations could continue despite the Notam outage, according to a Journal report. Pilots say the alerts often are irrelevant and unintelligible, and JetBlue reportedly developed a backup system because of a past Notam outage.
The FAA’s ground stop, which lasted nearly two hours, caused more than 1,300 flights across the U.S. to be canceled and at least 9,700 to be delayed. The agency blamed the Notam outage on a corrupted database file, though it’s also still investigating. Officials say there’s is no evidence so far of a cyberattack.
But given the importance of the FAA’s mission, this kind of failure is hard to excuse. If glitches happen all the time, why doesn’t the FAA have redundancies? Canada’s Notam system, operated by a nonprofit, experienced apparently unrelated problems, but planes there kept flying.
“Our responsibility is to make sure that everybody is safe, and we’re always going to err on the side of safety,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “When there’s an issue in FAA, we’re going to own it, we’re going to understand it, and we’re going to make very clear what’s needed in order to fix it.” But the FAA’s antiquated systems have long created headaches, albeit ones less glaring to the public.
Congress in 2003 mandated that the FAA implement a NextGen modernization plan by 2025, and it has given the agency money for upgrades. Yet an inspector general report in 2021 found that many FAA updates were delayed because of poor planning. The Notam overhaul has been slow.
We’ve argued for years that Congress should transfer air-traffic control and related systems to a private entity, as Canada did in 1996. This would provide more accountability, meaning that aging systems would get modernized faster.
Unlike airlines, the FAA doesn’t have to pay a price for its foul-ups. When problems with Southwest’s outdated scheduling software forced it to cancel thousands of flights after Christmas, Mr. Buttigieg threatened to punish the airline and insisted it fully refund passengers. When the government is at fault, airlines and travelers are out of luck.
Mr. Buttigieg’s “safety first” mantra is misdirection to distract from the FAA’s repeated failures. Recall how the FAA a year ago threatened to ground flights if wireless carriers turned on 5G C-Band spectrum near airports. The agency claimed the 5G signals could potentially interfere with plane altimeters that measure the distance to the ground.
The Federal Communications Commission disagreed when it authorized the 5G deployment some 20 months earlier, and the FAA didn’t raise concerns until weeks before the spectrum was set to go live. Wireless carriers ultimately agreed to pause part of their rollout. The FAA gave airlines until February 2024 to retrofit their altimeters, which it estimated would cost $26 million.
This is a fraction of the $80 billion that wireless carriers paid for the C-Band spectrum, as well as the cost of the two-year delay. Will the FAA compensate them? Of course not. Glitches happen all the time.
The Wall Street Journal
