An American Airlines Airbus A319 airplane takes off previous the air site visitors management tower at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, January 11, 2023
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
The Federal Aviation Administration stated Thursday {that a} contractor unintentionally deleted recordsdata earlier than an outage of a pilot-alert system that delayed hundreds of flights final week.
“A preliminary FAA review of last week’s outage of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system determined that contract personnel unintentionally deleted files while working to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database,” the FAA stated. Spokespeople for the company did not present additional element.
Those notices give pilots security data comparable to runway closures.
The FAA reiterated that it hasn’t discovered proof of a cyberattack or “malicious intent” and that it’s nonetheless investigating what occurred.
The company stated it up to date lawmakers on its investigation on Thursday. Lawmakers from each events demanded solutions about expertise vulnerabilities within the U.S. aviation system.
Airline executives complained about insufficient funding and staffing for the FAA.
“I lay this on the fact that we are not giving them the resources, the funding, the staffing, the tools, the technology they need,” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian stated on “Squawk Box” on Friday. “Hopefully this will be the call to our political leaders in Washington that we need to do better.”
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby stated on the corporate’s earnings name on Wednesday the outage and ensuing journey chaos “ought to be a wake-up call for all of us in aviation, something many of us in aviation have been saying for a long time…the FAA needs more resources.”