Canada’s air traffic system suffered a similar outage to the one that occurred in the US for a brief period on Wednesday. According to the Independent, US air travel was badly disrupted by the failure of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Notice to Air Missions system (NOTAM) overnight on Tuesday, forcing a full ground stop of domestic aviation on Wednesday morning.
Nav Canada, the Canadian national air navigation service provider, released a statement just after 12.30 pm as US airlines struggled to resume normal service. “Nav Canada’s Canadian NOTAM entry system is currently experiencing an outage affecting newly issued NOTAMs, and we are working to restore function.”
“We are not currently experiencing any delays related to this outage. We are assessing impacts to our operations and will provide updates as soon as they are available.” At approximately 2.30 pm Nav Canada released a further statement saying that the NOTAM system has been restored. A tweet posted by the agency stated: “Nav Canada continues to investigate the cause of the outage; at this time, we do not believe it to be related to the FAA outage experienced earlier today.”
Meanwhile, air traffic control officials realized they had a computer issue late Tuesday, they came up with a plan: Reboot the system when it would least disrupt air travel, early on Wednesday morning.
But ultimately that plan and the outage, described to CNN by a source familiar with the Federal Aviation Administration operation, led to massive flight delays and an unprecedented order to stop all aircraft departures nationwide. The Notice to Air Missions system, or NOTAM, is a critical and enormous safety computer system that advises pilots of issues along their route and at their destination.
It has a backup, which officials switched to when problems with the main system emerged, according to the source. FAA officials told reporters early Wednesday that the issues developed in the 3 p.m. ET hour on Tuesday. Officials ultimately found a corrupt file in the main NOTAM system, the source said.
A corrupt file was also found in the backup system. In the overnight hours of Tuesday into Wednesday, FAA officials decided to shut down and reboot the main NOTAM system — a significant decision, because the reboot can take about 90 minutes, according to the source.
