USA specified reason of the pilots’ alerting system failure

On January 11th Federal Aviation Authority of USA informed about failure of the pilots’ alerting system that could affect all the flights in the country and cause cancellation of the flights.

Failure took place in the alerting system NOTAM (notice to air missions) that is responsible for mailing in real time the information to the pilots about dangers of the flight and restrictions.

FAA faced failure that influenced NOTAM updates.

At the same time American airline company American Airlines informed that this involved only flights’ delays.

Later it was established that the failure of the pilots’ alerting system due to which in the United States for several hours have been suspended internal flights was caused by human error – specified Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). Earlier aviation authority affirmed that the reason of failure became damaged file.

NOTAM failure took place because of the mistake of two employees. They damaged file in active data base. Restarting the system from backup copy failed to be made quickly as well as backup copy of the data base tried to get access to the same damaged files. As result FAA engineers decided to stop platform work fully, rewrite all the files and only after this they managed to launch data base in normal operation.

Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) explained that unidentified employees of one of the contractors have seriously violated working procedures with informational system that prohibit to make technical works in run-time environment. As results as their actions was corrupted one or even several files of NOTAM data base.

FAA haven’t explained why contractor had access to such critical system and why employees of this company violated all the security protocols while working with NOTAM. Also, there is no data as of yet if these two employees introduced changes in the file accidently or purposely.

FAA specialists continue to study the reason of the incident to avoid such failures in the future.