By Dana Malcolm
Staff Writer
#UnitedStates, January 11, 2023 – An unprecedented three hour disruption in flights across the United States on Wednesday morning sent frustrating ripples south to the Turks and Caicos Islands, as the majority of air traffic to the islands originates from the north and the United States.
It was described as a major shutdown of the system of the FAA. The rare technical glitch is now attracting serious questions about the effectiveness of safety systems and the need for urgent upgrades at the US Federal Aviation Administration. The cause of that glitch is still unknown.
Around 11 am, Magnetic Media was on the phone to Arlington Musgrove, the Minister of Immigration and Border Security who confirmed delays had already been recorded for the tourism dependent UK overseas territory and would “certainly result in delays and challenges for those with connecting flights.”
The TCIs first flight unspecified by the Minister was pushed back to 12:35 pm and another, United 1465, had an
inbound delay of 3-hours resulting in a push back to 1:17 pm.
As time passed we got more back to back updates with at least three American Airlines flights pushed back
“AA1900 now delayed 1 hr, was scheduled to arrive at 13:12. AA1527 delayed 1 hour, originally scheduled to arrive at 14:41. AA879 delay 2 hours, originally scheduled to arrive at 14:21.” The Minister shared.
The US emergency ground order came at 7:15 Wednesday morning following what the FAA is describing as an overnight outage. The outage affected the Notice to Air Missions system (NOTAM) which provides safety information to flight crews and forced a nearly three hour halt in flights as the Agency struggled to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.
US President Joe Biden had revealed that they were working to find the cause of the incident but that flights could still land safely if they were already in the air, just not take off. The FAA confirmed this on Twitter.
“All flights currently in the sky are safe to land. Pilots check the NOTAM system before they fly. A Notice to Air Missions alerts pilots about closed runways, equipment outages, and other potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight.”
Though the stop order was lifted by 8:51 and the FAA resumed regular flight activity, the damage was done.
According to flight monitoring website Flight Aware between 7 and 11 am Wednesday there were 4,592 delays within, into, or out of the United States and 838 cancellations already.
More than a third of the delays (1742) and 206 cancellations were domestic.