Biden admin blamed for massive airline screw-up

The Federal Aviation Administration experienced a computer outage early Wednesday morning and ordered all departing flights to remain grounded. The result was hundreds of cancelations and thousands of delays for passengers across the country.

The agency lifted the grounding order just before 9 a.m. EST.

Critis say the FAA acted too late to keep the delays from snowballing… and much too late to save the reputation of President Joe Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

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Buttigieg, despite leading the FAA’s parent agency, reportedly found himself blindsided by the outage.

“I just spoke to Buttigieg. They don’t know what the cause is. But I was on the phone with him about 10 minutes,” Biden told reporters Wednesday while leaving the White House. “I told him to report directly to me when they find out. Air traffic can still land safely, just not take off right now. We don’t know what the cause of it is.”

Biden’s Transportation Department has made this mistake before.

Last year, the Biden administration received a briefing about the issues with customer service at Southwest Airlines, and yet the administration found itself blindsided by the airline’s meltdown last month.

Buttigieg has made the same mistake twice in the span of only a few weeks.

Some liberals have tried to absolve Buttigieg of any blame for Southwest’s issues, and they’re instead blaming airline executives.

“After the utter disaster of the last month, Southwest holds its executives to account by… giving a bunch of them promotions. They are just mocking Pete Buttigieg. And why shouldn’t they?” Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project wrote on Twitter.

But in this instance, Buttigieg manages the agency causing the delays.

Buttigieg has been facing scathing criticism for the longtime, ongoing issues with air travel. Donald Trump Jr described the FAA outage as “Yet another major blow to incompetent Transportation Sect Mayor Pete.”

All in all, more than 3,700 flights were delayed and more than 640 were canceled, with the tally still rising. Delays were concentrated along the East Coast, but they are spreading quickly to the West Coast.

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The stop order by the FAA impacts almost all flights of shippers and commercial airlines. Some medical flights could get clearance and the outage did not impact any military operations or mobility.

Flights for the U.S. military’s Air Mobility Command had not been impacted, said Air Force Col. Damien Pickart, a spokesman for Air Mobility Command is responsible for all the troop movement and supply flights, such as the C-17s that carry the president’s motorcade vehicles when he travels, but also all the flights that transport troops from one base to another. Air Mobility Command was working with the FAA on the issue.

While the White House initially said that there is no initial evidence of a cyberattack, Biden said “we don’t know” the true cause and told reporters he’s directed the Department of Transportation to investigate the disruption.

Buttigieg said in a tweet that he is in touch with the FAA and monitoring the situation.

The FAA said it was working on restoring its Notice to Air Missions System.

“We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now,” the FAA said. “Operations across the National Airspace System are affected.”

The agency said that some functions are beginning to come back on line, but that “National Airspace System operations remain limited.”

The FAA is working to restore what is known as the Notice to Air Missions System.

Before commencing a flight, pilots are required to consult NOTAMs, or Notices to Air Missions, which list potential adverse impacts on flights, from runway construction to the potential for icing. The system used to be telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for the information, but has now moved online.

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Breakdowns in the NOTAM system were previously very rare.

“I don’t ever remember the NOTAM system going down like this. I’ve been flying 53 years,” said John Cox, a former airline pilot and now an aviation-safety consultant.

According to FAA advisories, the NOTAM system failed at 8:28 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday by preventing new or amended notices from being distributed to pilots. The FAA resorted to a telephone hotline in an effort to keep departures flying overnight, but as daytime traffic picked up it overwhelmed the telephone backup system.

Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said the U.S. military flights were not impacted because the military has its own NOTAMS system separate from the FAA system and the military’s system was not affected by the outage.

European flights into the U.S. appeared to be largely unaffected.

Irish carrier Aer Lingus said services to the U.S. continue, and Dublin Airport’s website showed that its flights to Newark, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles were running on schedule.

“Aer Lingus plan to operate all transatlantic flights as scheduled today,” the carrier said in a prepared statement. “We will continue to monitor but we do not anticipate any disruption to our services arising from the technical issue in the United States.”

This is just the latest headache for travelers in the U.S. who faced flight cancellations over the holidays amid winter storms and a breakdown with staffing technology at Southwest Airlines. They also ran into long lines, lost baggage, and cancellations and delays over the summer as travel demand roared back from the COVID-19 pandemic and ran into staffing cutbacks at airports and airlines in the U.S. and Europe.

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The FAA said that it would provide frequent updates as it made progress.

Take a look —

I have been in touch with FAA this morning about an outage affecting a key system for providing safety information to pilots. FAA is working to resolve this issue swiftly and safely so that air traffic can resume normal operations, and will continue to provide updates.

— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) January 11, 2023

FAA has determined that the safety system affected by the overnight outage is fully restored, and the nationwide ground stop will be lifted effective immediately. I have directed an after-action process to determine root causes and recommend next steps.

— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) January 11, 2023

The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this artilcle.