The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is “continuing to assess the cause of the outage” that resulted in flights being temporarily grounded Wednesday morning, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a video update Wednesday afternoon.
“The most important thing I want passengers to know is our number one priority is safety,” he began.
“It’s one of the reasons why today for example, while this issue was being worked out on the system side, there was this ground stop of about an hour and a half nationwide to make absolutely sure out of an abundance of caution that no aircraft could take off without the necessary safety information,” Buttigieg continued, noting that they are “always going to err on the side of safety.”
“Having said that, we also have to make sure we understand everything there is to understand about this situation so that we can ensure that disruption like that doesn’t happen again,” he added, writing in the tweet that the FAA is continuing to “assess the causes of the outage”:
Safety is always our first priority, and ensuring flight safety was the reason for this morning’s ground stop while the affected systems were restored and checked. As normal flight operations have resumed, FAA continues to assess the causes of the outage. pic.twitter.com/JhsYKBDney
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) January 11, 2023
His video update came hours after the FAA temporarily grounded flights following an outage of the Notice to Air Missions System. Normal operations resumed shortly before 9 a.m. ET:
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
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023
During an appearance on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, Buttigieg said they are not prepared to rule out a domestic or foreign attack.
“We’re not prepared to rule that out. There hasn’t been any indication of that. The FBI has spoken to this, and of course, FAA is looking at that as well as they work to see exactly what was going on inside the files that were in the system leading to this irregularity,” he said.
“Again, what I would say is there’s no direct indication of any kind of external or nefarious activity. But we’re not yet prepared to rule that out,” he added.
Over 8,600 U.S.-related flights were delayed and 1,200 more canceled as of 3:30 p.m. ET.
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