"There are three parts to the problem: the system, the format, and the content. The system is actually quite amazing. The AFTN network connects every country in the world, and Notam information, once added, is immediately available to every user. Coupled with the internet, delivery is immediate.
The format is, at best, forgivable. It’s pretty awful. It’s a trip back in time to when Notams were introduced. You might think that was the 1960’s, or the 50’s. In fact, it’s 1924, when 5-bit ITA2 was introduced. The world shifted to ASCII in 1963, bring ing the Upper and Lower case format that every QWERTY key board uses today, but we didn’t follow – nope, we’ll stick with our 1924 format, thank you."
"The FAA is changing the format for Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) to align with international standards. The transition to the new format will ensure U.S. NOTAMs are compliant with standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and promote further global harmonization among neighboring Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs)."
Its even more amazing when you really sit down and think about all of the systems (many highly resistant to change like aircraft navigation systems) that all connect and utilize this service.
What appear like simple changes and proposals in the aerospace realm are extremely hard to execute and many times take decades (multiple) to come into play. Global services/systems are even harder.
I want to point out that lower-case is possible with ITA2. Start at 4.6 of ITU-T Recommendation S.2 / 11/1988 in the Blue Book, basically 11111 & 11011 11111 switch case in locking/unlocking mode.
OpsGroup, the organisation behind that guide is also worth mentioning. It's a self-organised advocacy organization for flight operations personnel. Apparently they have a longstanding campaign to reform the NOTAM system (as explained in the guide).
Fun but deadly. They’re not wrong about the absolute avalanche of irrelevant data that will be used to show you “you should have known” - hence the proliferation of “interpretation” services.
100%. As a GA pilot who mostly flies under IFR, the NOTAM system is borderline useless to me.
For every warning about an approach being altered or a runway closed, there are 100s of "birds invof airport" or "unlit crane 50' AGL 5 miles from the field" NOTAMs. And even for the relevant NOTAMs, Foreflight will highlight them for approaches etc and ATC won't send you to a closed runway or taxiway.
Seems like it's the sort of thing that's borderline useless right up until the moment it's absolutely essential.
Like the smoke alarms in my house, which are actually wired up to mains so don't technically need a battery, but they still have to have a battery in them and will give high pitched chirps ever few minutes when the battery is dead. And since there's so many in the house, and the chirp only comes every few minutes, it's a PITA to find the exact one that needs replacing.
So annoying, and again it's wired to mains so it worked without batteries! Except in a fire the fire might fry the house's magic box of energy delivery leaving only the batteries as the power source and then I really really really want them to work.
I've had way, way, way, too many 'chirp' at 4am situations in my life. The alarms have _literally_ trained me like Pavlov's dogs that it is _always_ a false alarm, to the point where my sleep deprived brain stumbles through the door blindly into the hallway without even checking if there's heat or smoke.
Some of the other solutions here like cry wolf only if battery low _and_ power's out, or a dedicated LED to indicate a problem, or the one I keep thinking of; gently _saying_ there's a problem with a small sound clip of "bat" instead of an angry Chirp that must wake someone up would really help. The alternative that I've heard many others take is to just disable them entirely if you're in a rental. I'll admit that I've been very tempted to do just that for individual alarms which are overly sensitive to bathroom steam.
We recently had a house burn in our neighborhood during a power outage that was running on a generator. Generator itself caught fire, so pretty much would cover that exact situation.
Yes, it wasn't like this in my house until some years ago when we had a small expansion constructed and the contractor installed these in the new portions just as a standard thing he does, and said he was retro fitting the rest of the house that way too. ( We know him, friends, so we know he wasn't just trying to get extra $ out of us)
For a few minutes I thought it seemed a needless detail, until I realized that often enough people forget to change their stand-alone unit batteries and maybe deal with the the occasional chirp in an "I'll get to it" mindset until it runs down completely. Having it tied to the mains solves that because it's relentlessly annoying to hear that chirp at random intervals, and the battery is a nice backstop failover from the mains going unexpectedly molten.
I mean, it is code now to have them hardwired up. Actually, I think the requirement might be for interconnectivity rather than mains power. It's probably both in some areas. It's quite possible, depending on the extent of your expansion, that he was required to retrofit all of the smoke detectors in the home.
I wish those mains-powered ones would just shriek continually if the battery was low AND mains power failed; then you could kill the breaker and find it easily.
Yeah, I bet one somewhere has it, but most just flash-when-chirp which is kinda annoying:
This alarm has a low/missing battery monitor circuit which will cause the alarm to “chirp’” approximately every 30 - 40 seconds for a minimum of seven (7) days when the battery gets low. The chirp will be accompanied by a flash of the Safety Light. Replace both bat- teries when this condition occurs.
Some of the newer ones come with a built-in Lithium battery that supposedly is good for 10 years.
Your analogy is way off. If smoke alarms worked like NOTAMs, they’d go off every time someone strikes a match, lights the fireplace, turns on the gas cooktop, uses a hair dryer, or plugs in any appliance. Oh yes, when the house is on fire too. All have non-zero risk of inferno.
NOTAMs are full of pages and pages of goop — inconsistent, impossible to accurately filter, hard to read, at times unclear, and mostly noise.
I think you’d not argue that if you flight to the airport without ATC (there are plenty of those), reading NOTAMS about that airfield is kind of essential exercise before flight.
Yeah, NOTAMs come into play when the shit hits the fan; radios are dead and you can't reach the tower kinda thing, but in that case just be sure you declared emergency, then they (probably) won't get you much for landing on a closed runway or a taxiway.
They have backup transmitters and if everything fails (tower evacuation has happened) you talk to the overlying approach / tracon / center frequencies to check. And then after that, land anyway and self announce positions for other traffic.
It's basically the same as landing at an airport that doesn't have a tower. Happens every day at hundreds of airports.
It's all fun and games until you have an F-16 head butting you because you didn't pay attention to NOTAMs and the Vice President happens to be visiting your town.
But it’s up to airline how they present NOTAMS to the pilot in the briefing package.
They can (and do) use geolocation present in some (many) NOTAMs to filter them out. For example do not show the NOTAM just because the flight path intersects with the airspace. They can do even better - consider not only location but also altitude range, the best flight planning systems can consider also estimated time of arrival of the plane near the location of the NOTAM and filter out those which are not yet valid or those which are expired (the validity range usually present in each message).
This makes the problem of including the NOTAM a 4-dimensional - geographical location 2 dimensions, altitude 1 dimension and a time. Not the easiest to solve, but solvable. Of course for every dimension margins can be applied to accommodate re-routes or departure delays, or ATC commands.
There is no written in stone standard of how to present NOTAMS. Newer may be displayed at the beginning, etc Not to say that they can (and do) separate airfield and airspace messages to segment the large set onto meaningful subsets.
I mean there ways to make sure important information is not lost and less important available if needed.
Airlines aren't the only things doing "air missions" - there is software that filters out much of it, but it IS quite archaic (similar to how the "official weather" notifications are set out).
Look at the Ukraine one for a pretty scary example.
The official weather notifications (METARs/TAFs) can be displayed in more modern ways, but many pilots like the brief coded weather messages because they can be easily skimmed for an entire route of flight.
In my mind, AIRMETs were a bigger problem - they had limitations in terms of how they were geographically defined, time range, and lack of flexibility (e.g. differentiating turbulence vs LLWS vs strong surface winds for AIRMET Tango) - but that's been fixed with the newer G-AIRMET feed[1], which is based around BUFR[2] instead of plain text.
The catch being you can't easily convey G-AIRMETs via voice or in an non-interactive environment, so we still keep the legacy text-based AIRMET feed around in parallel.
Double nit: this was not a misuse the deprecated term "The Ukraine" but the correct use of 'the' attaching to "Ukrainian one" referring to the NOTAM basically telling everyone to remain clear of Ukrainian airspace.
nit RFI: What is it about "Ukraine" (phonetically maybe?) that makes me, a westerner in the US, want to put a "the" before it every time I reference it as a country instead of just, you know, using the name of the country?
I don't go around calling other proper nouns "the" (mostly). I don't call my son "Hey there, the Bob, how was school today?" (his name is not bob). But if I had named my son Ukraine then I feel like I'd change that sentence to: "Hey! The Ukraine, how was school today?"
Why is this a thing? I have a formal background in applied/computational linguistics and a bit of trivial searching doesn't really reveal why this is a general tendency. Hurt's my brain meat.
Depending on your age and general personal history, in the past it was very common to see references and use of "the Ukraine" to talk about the region/area as well as the country (that mostly covers that geographical area). It could be remnants of your recollections popping up subconsciously.
In this case it really was meant to be projected as similar to "Have you seen the Bob document yet?"
In German (maybe some other languages too?) it's common to use "the" to refer to a 3rd person, so if Bob's sister Charlotte came home from school but not Bob, she could say "The Bob went to the mall".
Seems like it's the same way in Finnish, Finnish F1 driver Mika Häkkinen referred to Michael Schumacher as "The Michael".
This is my favorite quote: "In an unintended twist of irony, the agencies seeking to cover their legal ass are party to creating the most criminal of systems – an
unending flow of aeronautical sewage rendering the critical few pieces of information unfindable."
This is hilarious. Really appreciate the examples of irrelevant clutter obscuring important information. Any UX designer can learn from this as an example of what not to do.
GROUND STOP ALL FLIGHTS / ALL DESTINATIONS EXCLUDES MILITARY AC AND
MEDEVAC FLIGHTS
DESTINATION AIRPORT; ALL
FACILITIES INCLUDED: ALL
GROUND STOP PERIOD: UNTIL 1430Z
REASON: EQUIPMENT OUTAGE
REMARKS: US NOTAMS SYSTEM DOWN
I will never forget trying to set up a printer on a linux desktop 20+ years ago: tried to print a diagnostic/test page. All that printed was a single line of text: "Unable to connect to printer."
I'm surprised there's not more activity on this here on HN. I guess info is limited, so I found what I could from ATCSCC notices for today [1]. These are all the notices but portions only w/ redundant bits removed. See link in citation if you want full messages. Times here appear to be GMT:
004 DCC 01/11/23 NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE_FYI 01/11/23 00:47
THE NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE IS BEING ACTIVATED TO ADDRESS THE EQUIPMENT
OUTAGE ISSUES FOR THE UNITED STATES NOTAM SYSTEM.
013 DCC 01/11/23 NOTAM SYSTEM EQUIPMENT OUTAGE_FYI 01/11/23 04:18
THE UNITED STATES NOTAM SYSTEM FAILED AT 2028Z. SINCE THEN NO NEW
NOTAMS OR AMENDMENTS HAVE BEEN PROCESSED. TECHNICIANS ARE CURRENTLY
WORKING TO RESTORE THE SYSTEM AND THERE IS NO ESTIMATE FOR
RESTORATION OF SERVICE AT THIS TIME.
014 DCC 01/11/23 NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE_FYI 01/11/23 04:19
HE NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE IS BEING ACTIVATED TO ADDRESS THE EQUIPMENT
OUTAGE ISSUES...
015 DCC 01/11/23 NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE_FYI 01/11/23 07:42
THE NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE IS BEING ACTIVATED TO ADDRESS THE
EQUIPMENT...
016 DCC 01/11/23 NOTAM SYSTEM EQUIPMENT OUTAGE_FYI 01/11/23 07:44
THE UNITED STATES NOTAM SYSTEM FAILED AT 2028Z. TECHNICIANS ARE
CURRENTLY WORKING TO RESTORE THE SYSTEM AND THERE IS NO ESTIMATE FOR
RESTORATION OF SERVICE AT THIS TIME. THERE IS CURRENTLY A HOTLINE IN
EFFECT WHICH HAS NAIMES/FAA FACILITIES/STAKEHOLDERS IN ATTENDANCE.
020 DCC 01/11/23 NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE_FYI 01/11/23 10:58
THE NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE IS BEING ACTIVATED...
030 DCC 01/11/23 NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE_FYI 01/11/23 12:37
THE NOTAM OUTAGE HOTLINE HAS BEEN TERMINATED.
In short, the terminology being used so far is "equipment failure".
I wanted to keep my above comment to the data only, so I'll post this here: "Equipment Failure" can cover just about anything. I think the "gut" reaction the public might have here when hearing that phrase is that it was physical equipment, but really it could have been software, network linkages, really anything. I hope the real cause here doesn't get buried somewhere in lack of follow up.
Also I really wish I'd been awake when the hotline was active (# was in the full notices linked) so I could call in and see what they were talking about as a silent observer. I can't tell from the context if that was a general status hotline, a failover service to provide the same data NOTAM would have done (though if that were the case then grounding flights wouldn't have been necessary) [1] or discussion of the actual problem and specific efforts to resolve.
[1] Well, only if it was a more benign & limited cause that wouldn't be expected to spill over into other systems. If the nature of the problem included the possibility of a malign actor then other vectors of attacks would not have been (and maybe still aren't, if that was the source) off the table.
FAA and most all global air systems and services tend to use their own nomenclature for communicating to pilots -- I would read "equipment failure" as a term that pilots would use and understand as "a temporary or permanent failure of software or hardware in the system" and not read into it any additional common sense from other areas of expertise.
The limited activity is probably because it's actually not that exciting from a technical perspective.
The answer is almost certainly something like "lack of funding forces FAA to continue using massively outdated systems and this is what happens when someone trips over the power cord of the mainframe in some basement".
It's much more interesting when companies like Google or Facebook go down, because they properly fund their infrastructure and there might be something for the HN crowd to learn.
Because they're not always doing secretive stuff, and even their secretive missions may start and end in airspace they have to share with friendly airliners.
> An FAA system outage is causing ground stops at AUS and other airports across the country. Arriving & departing passengers can expect delays this morning & through the day.
If you’re flying today, it’s gonna be a rough one.
" Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. 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"
Very entertaining to watch the local TV news this morning.
The reporter keeps pulling people aside as they arrive at the airport and asking them what they're going to do with all the planes grounded.
None of them know it's happening.
So far, they have all admitted that they either don't look at the news, or don't look at the local news, except for one woman who defiantly said, "It wasn't on Facebook," as if that meant that since the grounded flights weren't in her social media feed that it wasn't real.
REALLY IMPORTANT NOTAMS tend to alert pilots to RESTRICTED AIRSPACE or AREAS OF UNUSUAL AIR OPERATIONS. You can't fly anywhere near the President of the United States, the movements of which can change from day to day.
We get NOTAMS about military aircraft operations; often military airspace which is usually permitted may be shut down for a week or so.
Wildfire tanker operations or other natural emergencies can close an airspace.
It's quite dynamic, all on top of the scheduled flight plans and routes.
If you like lots of daily mail, become responsible for the operation of a Cessna 172 (Skyhawk), the type of aircraft with the most units built of any, ever. Endless variations.
Unending stream of paper NOTAMS via US first class post office... at least, when I had a 172, 20 years ago.
These notices are exactly like a recall notice on an automobile: get someone to validate the steering wheel etc. I would suppose that many HN readers have gone through the car hardware remediation process.
I would suppose that this class of NOTAM, although in my particular case the most common, are not immediately relevant to a total Ground Stop Order for the USA. But -- consider that airline and other commercial operators may have their own internal requirements that could ground a fleet in the absence of an ability to state that they have complied with all relevant FAA NOTAMS. Oh, the liability!!
The NOTAM system is embarrassing. This just tops it off. Actually, our whole ATC system and the way the FAA operates is embarrassing. It all works kind of like waste management in NYC. If they were to add new tech and efficiency, fewer people would have jobs, so we keep doing it the old way to the detriment of everyone else.
A general inefficiency example using two airpots I often have in mind: IAH and JFK. In IAH, traffic is spaced out in cruise well before the arrival begins, where they're burning much less fuel at high altitude. They're then instructed to descend via the full STAR (standard terminal arrival), including the transition to the approach for the runway in use. This looks like a hundreds mile long line of planes all following the same path to the same runway. The only further instruction necessary from ATC is speed adjustment, and allows for an almost continuous descent to the runway provided there's no weather in the way.
At JFK, the spacing occurs much later and, even though the airport has some similar arrivals (though none quite as thorough), they instruct every altitude change and speed adjustment for every aircraft individually, along with vectoring them to the approach for the runway in use. It results in an incredibly busy radio environment and numerous inputs from pilots flying planes capable of simply following a STAR and transition, like in IAH (or ORD, SFO, LAX, etc). There's also much more time spent at low altitude burning more fuel. It reminds me of everything else in NYC, which seems to be inefficient on purpose (NYPD, MTA, DSNY, etc.).
JFK and IAH have a similar number of aircraft movements. Yes, NYC has busier airspace with numerous airports, however, I don't see how this prevents the design and implementation of more modern procedures. Flying around at 4000 feet in an airliner getting numerous vectors just seems ridiculous compared to what I experience elsewhere.
This whole comment seems like a charming case of advanced Dunning-Kruger. You sound very confident in your assessment, but then it seems you are honestly suggesting that NYC TRACON controllers are being inefficient on purpose… for what? Fun times? You said it yourself— it is a busier airspace. The approach and departure spacing of EWR, JFK, LGA and TEB— not to mention the changeable airspace restrictions over parts of NYC itself and managing GA traffic into and out of the Hudson River Corridor— makes a simple single hundred mile long elephant walk to your preferred runway at JFK logistically untenable. Not to mention potential conflicting traffic from smaller airports in Connecticut and Long Island… And just a gentle reminder that as pilot in that airspace you have precisely one small piece of the big picture when it comes to being aware of exactly how complicated that can be for the ATC personal.
It’s easy to say things are about jobs but do we have any evidence of that? There’s a modernization project underway at the FAA so I’d bet that if you looked there’s someone who’s been trying for years to get attention on it before something like this happened.
I've got a trip to take in a couple weeks. I have a choice: 4 hours of driving followed by two regional flights. Or just forget flying and drive 16 hours point to point. Between today's issues and all the headaches at YVR over the holidays, driving 16 hours seems more comfortable and less stressful than rolling the dice with regional airline travel.
I would rather be stuck driving my car for a day than spend a day sleeping on the floor of an airport lobby.
I used to need to be in a city every other week that was only a 1.5 hour flight.
I decided to see if driving might get me there in comparable time if I compared when I closed my front door to when I opened the door of my destination.
I was surprised to find that the time it took as almost the same. That's because flying requires:
* start drive to airport (45 minutes)
* park and get on a shuttle (15 minutes)
* get to gate (30 minutes)
* wait (60 minutes because I'm early by an hour)
* fly (1:45)
* taxi to gate (5-45 minutes)
* walk to light rail stop (10 minutes)
* ride light rail too stop (45 minutes)
* walk to destination (15 minutes)
Whenever I opt for 'roadtrip', almost inevitably, about 4-5 hours in, I wish I were flying. When I fly, I don't usually say "oh, I wish I'd driven" (unless there's a delay or problem).
As I've driven more, I need to allot myself more stops. If a trip is over 10 hours, I'll probably split it in 2 days, and stay overnight some place. 20 years ago, I would have 'pressed on', but... it's usually not worth it any more. But some of the 'cost savings' of driving go away when you factor in hotels.
It happened last time on a nearly identical itinerary. First flight was late. Missed connection. Landed at second airport too late for the bus (military to base where my car was parked). Had to spend night in hotel waiting for bus the following day.
Time before that, I arrived on time but my bag did not. Had to wait at airport for six hours for bag. Missed bus. Hotel. Bus the following day.
If I'm understanding the situation correctly: the system stopped processing updates yesterday afternoon and it wasn't a big deal, then they tried restarting it this morning to fix it and it didn't come back up, so now older NOTAMs from before the issue started are not available. Is that right?
Do airlines/planes keep a cached copy of these? How large is the NOTAM database?
Not really. And for most commercial pilots this may come down to whether or not ForeFlight caches theirs or not. I'd actually be really curious to see unofficial commentary from ForeFlight developers about this because it's a pretty unique scenario in the age of electronic flight bags.
The problem isn't keeping a copy, it's sending updates that are very time critical (for example restricted areas around POTUS, any impactful event, etc.)
As of 06:24 US Eastern the appears to no longer be true. There is a NOTAM outage but no full ground stop is mentioned, just a few specific due to weather.
Edit: obviously a developing situation, see responses to this comment for current advisories.
I don't know how these things work, but the most recent advisory, 027, seems to imply that United Airlines has a full ground stop until 15:00 UTC / 10:00 Eastern.
Edit: Of course as I was typing that, Advisory 028 pops up with a nationwide ground stop until 9:30 Eastern: "GROUND STOP ALL FLIGHTS / ALL DESTINATIONS EXCLUDES MILITARY AC AND MEDEVAC FLIGHTS"
Yep, the situation has changed since the post was made. Parent comment was correct at the time, however.
At 5:40am Eastern, the agent at my departure gate told us that there was a ground stop affecting all flights, which was reflected in my original title. This was not reflected in the NOTAM I posted, as was pointed out by several early commenters, and in fact my flight was able to board and depart around 7:00am Eastern before the ground stop took effect.
More modern systems are also down once in a while. With aviation it's just more visible because one system can affect a lot of people.
I'm not sure when ATC systems (which I would count NOTAM to be one of) have last failed, I always had the feeling they're very stable. It's usually airlines that struggle with their applications.
I never know how well it applies but headline outages always make me think of that “The Coming Software Apocalypse” Atlantic article from a few years back[0]
All hyper optimized systems become fragile until they collapse.
The NOTAM system is ridiculous, no surprise it collapsed ... you can lose your ticket for flying thru a MOA that went active AFTER you took off.
What could possibly go wrong with a "push" notification system for every tiny little detail of aerospace scheduling?
No force is as destructive as the good idea fairy.
I'm not sure your specific example is a particularly good one. I can legally fly through an MOA that's active, without needing ATC or military authorization.
That's the curse of niche software. Especially one made to fit, it's easy for penny pincher to decide "it works fine now, it doesn't need ongoing improvements" and you end up with some ancient shit needing java 1.7 (or worse) to run with no plan to upgrade.
The software is tied to a dependency chain of real people (passengers, crew, etc), real equipment, and lots of constraints. So problems have a downstream effect that's more pronounced and visible than many other spaces.
Wondering if this is just standard aging infrastructure embarrassment or could involve a cyberattack? Cause if I were a state actor with a beef this is exactly the sort of soft-but-expensive injury I'd want to inflict: extremely disruptive, but also hard to assess or explain to the public.
Q: Is there anything like a systems architecture diagram for how NOTAM works? I'm curious about which parts might have failed and what the moving pieces are.
>Update 5: Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. 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
> Update 4: The FAA is making progress in restoring its Notice to Air Missions system following an overnight outage. Departures are resuming at
@EWRairport
and
@ATLairport
due to air traffic congestion in those areas. We expect departures to resume at other airports at 9 a.m. ET.
> Flights to US airports have been groundstopped by the FAA until at least 09:30 ET (1430 UTC). This means any flight not in the air already will not be allowed to depart. Image: flights over US now compared to same time last week. About 700 fewer flights airborne now.
> Flights are being held as the FAA works to bring the NOTAM (NOtice To Air Missions) system back online.
> Update 3: The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage.
> The FAA has ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. Eastern Time to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.
> The President has been briefed by the Secretary of Transportation this morning on the FAA system outage. There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point, but the President directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into the causes. The FAA will provide regular updates.
I was wondering if this might be related to elastic's "several customer facing deployments deleted across multiple regions" issue from earlier today? The timing seemed to line up a bit.
heh, my boss was on a public sector project that went so far south she was stalked by news crews leaving the office. The experience left a pretty deep scar on her. This was before my time thank babyjeebus.
Kinda wondering the odds of there being one crying into their coffee over a stack of memos saying they should do something before it fails, or some greybeard angrily pointing to their quality control concerns on a new system. Both are pretty common with federal IT.
EVENT TIME: 11/1126 - 11/1500
UAL GROUND STOP ALL FLIGHTS / ALL DESTINATIONS PER USER REQUEST
DESTINATION AIRPORT; ALL
FACILITIES INCLUDED: ALL
GROUND STOP PERIOD: UNTIL 1500Z
REASON: USER REQUEST
REMARKS: US NOTAMS SYSTEM DOWN
Air Traffic Control System Command Center Advisory 23 by the Traffic Management Command Center (DCC) at date [..] - all united airlines ... ground stop.
Could it have been a nuclear option used by a federal agency to hold someone's possible escape? Perhaps they were not sure which plane, so they had to hold all. Or it was just the most immediate route
Lets say you are not flying to, but flying by, my hometown airport. You decide arbitrarily to use it as a divert in case of awful weather or engine trouble enroute or you just want a bathroom break (this is more of a Cessna 172 airport than a 747 airport)
I found a cached list of nine current NOTAMs for my home airport. Because its always better to overinform than to underinform, until the system overloads and crashes:
A long ramble that boils down to you can't use one of the IFR plates for a helicopter approach because of (its a very long story but relates to the crane mentioned below)
The modulation level on the closest VOR for identification/verification is low, although in legal tolerance, so you can use it but please stop trying to open the equivalent of a trouble ticket. We know the volume is both technically legal although low and not "turned up all the way". The techs say its safe until new parts arrive.
There's three failed tower lights in the area (three? Supply chain problems? Labor problems? WTF?) and one temporary crane obstruction. The crane is flagged and lit, and could theoretically be 60 ft AGL which is normally below the legal limit but its on airport grounds 0.13 miles away from one runway off to the side, so please try not to hit it. Also please don't bother reporting a crane off to the side of the approach; we know all about it...
Clearance delivery for the "big city" airport nearby has a remote trans/rec site nearby that's broken. Legal coverage is adequate (kind of a RAID array of retrans sites) so please stop reporting the reduced signal strength, we already know.
There's some kind of flood on runway 10 when it very heavily rains; the groundskeepers will fix the drainage problem; the NWS reports 0% chance of rain today so it probably won't be an issue, but don't act all surprised. This is not a NOTAM for groundskeeper work, that would be a separate new NOTAM.
Not retain it, you probably have a copy with you which you would read if you did end up diverting somewhere. NOTAMs also affect which airports go in your "would divert to" list when you're planning the flight. E.g. if the NOTAMs say AirportA's lights are unserviceable, you wouldn't plan it as a diversion airport for your night flight.
> Is someone who is planning multiple divert airports seriously expected to retain all of that information and recall it in the case of an emergency?
I am a pilot and yes, you are absolutely expected to be aware of all NOTAMS relevant to your flight.
FAA examiners will make you do it on checkrides, and depending on how cute they are feeling that day, they may very well quiz you, and will gleefully fail you because you weren't aware that, say, one particular runway was out of service, or there was a runway light out somewhere.
The implication is that someone planning a long cross country trip may have dozens of NOTAMS at many diversion airports to review. At some point all the NOTAM lawyering seems a bit much.
If I were a helicopter in IFR conditions and I just need a gas stop, I've never landed here, I'd forget about it, there's five heliports within 20 miles that have absolute zero drama. Legally technically the heliport is open but why risk it?
If I were shooting an IFR approach for currency in perfectly clear air, or with an instructor and its midday and cloudless right now, sure, have some good training.
If the engine's on fire, well, your odds are vastly better trying to land than trying to fly 20 miles away. If you're 600 feet off course and below 60 feet AGL you're probably going to crash anyway so don't worry about a crane.
They just have a crane onsite fixing some things, its not like the airport is closed just don't be surprised seeing some extra flashing lights and flags.
You're expected to have the information with you. Having read it before flight also increase the chance that it jogs your memory; "closest airport is CVG, didn't I see something... ah, yes, nuked last week, let's go to Columbus".
The NOTAMs for a commercial flight from JFK to LAX, for example, would be several pages long. Warnings about construction work at either airport, closed taxiways, cranes in the vicinity of the airport, enroute navigational aids which are unusable, etc. ATC can't relay that for every departing flight. Additionally, the NOTAM system is where they'd retrieve these from, so if that's down they have nothing to relay.
NOTAM notices are not only for planes but for other people and equipment using airspace, like drones, skydivers, ... Those are not always connected with ATC, but need the information from NOTAM to plan their activities
If I print the NOTAMs for a 600nm flight, they're going to typically go 4+ pages of NOTAMs that are fairly specific to my flight (just for departure, along route, and destination airports) and 15+ pages if I print all available NOTAMs in a fairly small font.
Most glitches are localized, or there's backup systems, or you can fall back to manual human processes.
If pilots/dispatchers can't get current NOTAMs, the aircraft can't safely depart - especially if they're flying IFR. There's no way around it.
(One could argue about whether it's legal for general aviation traffic to depart VFR - the regs say you need "all available information", and the information isn't available. But that's arguing semantics.)
There was a NOTAM outage about a year ago where Leidos' (the Flight Service contractor in the lower 48) computer system failed and prevented entering new notices, but as a backup they were able to call Alaska FSS on the phone. Since Alaska's FSS is still run by the federal government and used a different computer system, their system was still online.
But in this case the outage is on the FAA's (upstream) side.
> What's going on? I don't believe the "technical glitch" narrative. I'm sure there have been many glitches since 2001, and yet FAA never felt the need to do this.
Are you saying the FAA is not telling the truth? What evidence do you have to believe this is a conspiracy, rather than simply an unusual event?
In fairness, the FAA was deep in bed with Boeing until very recently and had to be publically embarrassed by Trump of all individuals to get them to clean up their act.
So I won't blame someone if they feel the FAA can't be trusted.
I’m sure there have been many technical problems in all of the FAA’s systems in 20 years. And, yes, none have caused a full ground stop. But you seem to doubt it happened because it hasn’t happened before.
Something to keep in mind is the NOTAM system never had an outage like this in those 20 years. And a full ground stop in the event of no one getting NOTAMs is completely reasonable.
So, I think you’re only left with two options: 1. NOTAM system went down by natural failure 2. NOTAM system was taken down intentionally to cause a full ground stop.
I’ll consider them independently then compare. Option 1 to me seems incredibly likely given a long enough timeline. It’s easy to say now in retrospect, but I think an 80% probability of a multi hour outage over 20 years is my best guess. These systems mostly go back to the 60s and are held together with bailing wire and bubblegum.
Option 2 is a hell of a blast radius for not much effect. You want to secretly keep an airplane from flying for a few hours so you… ground every plane in the US? There seem to be easier ways to go about that. Maybe you want no one to be in the air for a few hours? The motivations that would require that are beyond “special operations mission” and into “testing alien technology” territory. I’m not sure this even achieved the goal of putting everyone on the ground. It may have only been takeoffs.
Anyway, I think this comparison is hard. I mean, it’s easy for me. 80% on 1, 0.1% on 2, so 800:1.
But it’s probably hard to change someone’s mind about this. You either think the government is willing to ground every plane in the US for a few hours and lie about it plus has motivation to do so or you don’t. I’m probably not going to sway many people with the argument “yes, these systems are essential and yes, they are shitty” but maybe I will.
I think it's an outlandish claim that a technical glitch happened today that caused such a degree of widespread outage that the FAA had to take a step it hadn't taken since September 11, 2001.
A vague statement from the FAA isn't evidence either, just like a statement from the CDC not to buy masks isn't evidence they don't work to protect against a virus.
And I'm not claiming I have any evidence other than publicly observable patterns relating to both technical glitches and government transparency.
I'm speculating, based on the fact that technical glitches usually occur more than once every 21 years (or even less frequently, since 9/11 grounding was not due to a technical glitch), and that government agencies often lie to the public, that the FAA is not telling the whole truth.
And that is my right to do when commenting pseudonymously on an internet forum. You are similarly free to disagree with me or defer to your blind fealty to a government agency.
"based on the fact that technical glitches usually occur more than once every 21 years (or even less frequently, since 9/11 grounding was not due to a technical glitch), and that government agencies often lie to the public, that the FAA is not telling the whole truth"
Prove these are facts.
The reason I don't respect your opinion is because you don't know the difference between an opinion and facts and i don't like people like you lying on Hacker News.
How is it an outlandish claim that one of their system's crashed? Is it unusual that a computer system crashes even if it's a rare event?
If a website went down and the company said "the system crashed" you wouldn't believe them without proof? What could the FAA provide you to prove this?
Either it's extremely unusual (once in 21+ years), or happens more often than that but only this time did they decide to ground all planes in response to the glitch. In the latter case, then they must not be telling the whole truth, because they're omitting whatever is "different" about this time that changed their response to a glitch in this system.
Are 2020s the years where the cold war is back as a lukewarm war, and also all of NA aviation needs to reconvene with its decrepit software? Next plot-twist, it was all ready to blow, but ultimately triggered by Russian/Chinese/North Korean hackers.
Ok, taking off my tinfoil hat. Still, maybe I'm suffering of nostalgia bias but the last few years really make for a lot of prime source material for docudramas.
Forensic analysis will reveal that there were multiple hidden failures over the past years that were covered up by foreign hackers to ensure their backdoors were not revealed in an in-depth investigation.
