As of last night, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was still trying to determine the root cause of the 'Notice to Air Missions' (NOTAM) system outage.
NOTAM is used to alert aircraft pilots of potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight. It includes data on a raft of different hazards such as rocket launches; flights by important people, such as heads of state; closed runways; military exercises, and a whole host of other events which could disrupt a flight.
“Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file,” the FAA said. “At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber-attack.”
A senior official briefed on the internal review told ABC News that an engineer “replaced one file with another” without realising the mistake. “It was an honest mistake that cost the country millions.”
The system has now been fixed and flights are starting to resume operation. The FAA was able to lift...