TAMPA, Fla. — Flights across the country were grounded Wednesday morning after a system outage with the FAA, causing thousands of delays.
“You look at the board, and it’s like all red,” said Kaden Verhulst.
Verhulst found out his flight was delayed at Tampa International Airport when trying to get back to Minneapolis.
“It was first delayed by an hour, and now it’s another hour, so it’s two hours right now,” said Verhulst.
It was just one of the thousands of flights delayed across the country.
By about 9:00 am Wednesday, the FAA said a ground stop had been lifted and that normal air traffic operations were resuming gradually across the country after an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system.
The FAA explained this alerts pilots about closed runways, equipment outages, and other potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight.
“I got a notification this morning as I was packing up that the first-hour delay was happening, and then we were just here like five minutes ago, and Kaden yelled out, we got another delay for another hour,” said Benjamin Lemay. “Not the greatest, but at least I’m with a good group of friends, so I’m happy about that.”
JP Dice is a corporate pilot. He said the FAA’s goal with the ground stop was focused on safety by keeping planes on the ground until everything was sorted out.
Dice explained the problem when this system has an outage.
“For example, you’re flying into Tampa International. Let’s say there’s an instrument landing system that is not functioning. Pilots wouldn’t have that information ahead of time. What if there’s a runway closure?” said Dice. “The only way to really convey that information now instead of the text-based information, air traffic controllers would actually have to just read that information to pilots, and you can see the inefficiencies of having to go with verbal communications as opposed to being able to look that up on a computer screen.”
As for how long the aftermath of the outage with delays will take to get back on track, Sheldon Jacobson, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, said it’s going to take a good part of Wednesday.
“There’s a certain amount of competition. There’s a limited amount of space. You just can’t fit them all into the air system and onto the runways. You have to cancel some of them, so people may find that a 4:00 pm flight is going to be canceled today, and then they say that doesn’t seem fair,” said Jacobson. “It’s just the way you manage the flights in the system.”
Still, some passengers are hopeful from here on out that their travel will be smooth sailing.
“I just had to put my faith in the Flamingo Phoebe and the flight gods, and here I am,” said Linda Coccia.
