FAA orders all flights grounded for the first time since 9/11
Airline pilot Michael Santoro says he's 'not surprised' flights were grounded after the NOTAM system outages and explains how pilots and airlines may be impacted.
Twitter users lambasted the state of modern air travel and directed blame at Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it had suffered a system failure.
On Wednesday morning, the FAA announced the agency was working to restore the Notice to Air Missions System, which had severely limited operations of the National Airspace System. After multiple hours, the system continued to produce errors before slowly coming back online around 9 a.m. ET.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Biden had been briefed on the incident and claimed there was no evidence that a cyber attack had crippled the FAA systems.
Twitter users, instead of pointing the finger at a foreign actor or human error, were quick to bash Buttigieg for the massive outage.
Former GOP aide Mike Davis tweeted a scathing rebuke of Buttigieg’s job performance, and said the former "small-town mayor" was not qualified for the position of transportation secretary in Biden’s cabinet.
Donald Trump Jr. said the issue was a "major blow" to the "incompetent" transportation secretary.
"Hey Pete... you really, really suck at your job," Red State Managing Editor Jennifer Van Laar tweeted. "Also, why are all government computer systems antiquated? Y'all get enough help from the tech sector."
Several others also criticized Buttigieg over the major technical issues.
Reuters reporters David Shepardson noted that last month NOTAMs were renamed as "Notice to Air Mission" to be "inclusive of all aviators and missions."
Biden addressed the FAA issue on Wednesday before leaving the White House. He said he had just been briefed by Buttigieg, who told him they still had not identified what went wrong.
"I just spoke to Buttigieg. They don’t know what the cause is. But I was on the phone with him about 10 minutes," Biden said. "I told him to report directly to me when they find out. Air traffic can still land safely, just not take off right now. We don’t know what the cause of it is."
At 8 a.m. ET, there were more than 2,500 delayed flights within, into or out of the U.S., according to the flight tracking website FlightAware, exceeding the number of all delayed flights on the previous day. More than 150 have been canceled, and those numbers are likely to grow.
Many Americans have expressed frustrations in the U.S. airline system after a tumultuous Christmas travel week.
Buttigieg on Thursday said the issues at the time were compounded by nationwide snowstorms and thousands of canceled flights, most notably from Texas-based Southwest Airlines.
He reiterated that the USDOT made a "ton of progress" in promised preparations for the winter travel season, despite critics' claims his agency dropped the ball.
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"Matter of fact, every airline recovered except for one — Southwest Airlines. That's right: They failed to invest in the kind of IT systems that they needed and made several other operational mistakes," he said, placing the blame on Southwest.
When asked if the USDOT was aware of Southwest's antiquated scheduling system prior to the Christmas rush, the secretary replied he does not run the airline, but does regulate it.
Fox News’ Danielle Wallace and Charles Creitz contributed to this report.
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