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More than 500 flights at O’Hare International Airport and Midway Airport were delayed Wednesday morning because of a computer outage at the Federal Aviation Administration that brought flights across the country to a standstill. Another 89 flights at the two airports were canceled, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.
The FAA lifted its ground stop just before 8 a.m. CST Wednesday, but residual delays and cancellations continued throughout the day as airlines worked to resume flights, and passengers were encouraged to check the status of their flights. United, Southwest and American all offered flexible rebooking options.
Marty Halston said his Southwest flight from Midway to Fort Lauderdale was delayed about two hours and 40 minutes Wednesday morning. The delay was unfortunate, but waiting passengers were orderly and the staff was helpful, even as the airport got crowded, he said.
“You got three groups of people at every gate, because the people that are coming for the 9:30 flights and the people that are here for the 6 a.m. flight are all on top of each other,” he said.
He only flies a few times a year, and chalked the delay up to a bad break, he said.
“What are you going to do?” Halston asked as he prepared to board his flight and start a vacation with friends. “You can’t fly, you can’t fly.”
The outage showed how dependent the world’s largest economy is on air travel, and how much air travel depends on an antiquated computer system to generate alerts called NOTAMs — or Notice to Air Missions — to pilots and others.
Before a flight takes off, pilots and airline dispatchers must review the notices, which include information about weather, runway closures or construction and other information that could affect the flight. The system was once telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for the information, but has moved online.
The NOTAM system broke down late Tuesday and was not fixed until 9 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, leading to about 1,200 flight cancelations and more than 7,800 delays by early afternoon on the East Coast, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Even after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted the order grounding planes, the chaos was expected to linger. More than 21,000 flights were scheduled to take off in the U.S. Wednesday, mostly domestic trips, and about 1,840 international flights expected to fly to the U.S., according to aviation data firm Cirium.
Airports in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta were seeing between 30% and 40% of flights delayed.
“There was a systems issue overnight that led to a ground stop because of the way safety information was moving through the system,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at a press conference. “That was resolved, which allowed the ground stop to be lifted at 9 this morning, but through the day we’re going to see the effects of that rippling through the system.”
Buttigieg said his agency was now turning to understand what caused the NOTAM system to go down.
Longtime aviation insiders could not recall an outage of such magnitude caused by a technology breakdown. Some compared it to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the terror attacks of September 2001.
“Periodically there have been local issues here or there, but this is pretty significant historically,” said Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines and now a consultant in Minneapolis.
Campbell said there has long been concern about the FAA’s technology, and not just the NOTAM system.
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“So much of their systems are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable but they are out of date,” he said.
John Cox, a former airline pilot and aviation safety expert, said there has been talk in the aviation industry for years about trying to modernize the NOTAM system, but he did not know the age of the servers that the FAA uses.
“I’ve been flying 53 years. I’ve never heard the system go down like this,” Cox said. “So something unusual happened.”
The Associated Press contributed.