Following a concerning period of US flights being delayed today, Wednesday the 11th of January, good news has come out that the flights within the US are getting back to their normal schedule after the disruption was resolved.
According to reports, a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system failure was the cause for the consistent flight delays and cancellations that occurred throughout the morning, with many airlines posting to their consumers about potential delays throughout the day. This system failure caused thousands of cancellations of US flights because of the crash of the Notice to Air Missions (Notam) system just this morning.
This is the system that warns pilots and flight personnel concerning hazards or changes to airport services and procedures. As a significant piece of the system, the failure resulted in the FAA imposing a “ground stop” on all departing flights that would be affected.
Despite the concern and reports that came out this morning concerning the great number of delays and cancellations, at midday today, Wednesday the 11th of January, the FAA released a statement that said, “Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the US following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted. We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem.”
The initial “ground stop” was intended to affect all US flights until 9:30 am Eastern Time, or 14:30 UK time. Many airlines are glad to see that this issue has found the beginning of a resolution in time for no more flights to be cancelled, though some may still see some slight delays.
In response, a spokesperson for Virgin Atlantic said, “Due to FAA restrictions, some US departures may be affected by delays and we apologise in advance to affected customers,” and a spokesperson for British Airways said, “Our flights to and from the US are continuing to operate as planned.”
According to the data firm, Cirium, a total of 21,464 were originally due to depart US airports on Wednesday, this providing close to three million seats for passengers. Of these, more than 3,700 US flights were delayed by 8:30 am Eastern Time, this followed by the cancellation of over 640 US flights.
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