Just days after an American Airlines flight collided with a Black Hawk helicopter near Washington, D.C., a critical aviation system that affects flights around the country went down.
What is going on in our skies?
Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, “is the system where pilots download their information; their flight details before they fly. So, if the NOTAM system doesn’t work, planes don’t fly,” said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
“It went down last night. A backup system was activated. As of right now, the lead system is online and working,” Duffy told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” Sunday.
There was “minimal disruption” as a result of the outage, he said, adding he wants to “expedite” fixes to the NOTAM system, which he described as “an old system that needs to be upgraded.”
The incident is just the latest in a string of disturbing glitches, close calls and catastrophes.
As Time reported, 2023 saw the highest number of serious runway incidents in almost a decade in the U.S. Concerns have been raised about staffing and burnout at aviation agencies.
After the COVID pandemic, the number of “near misses”—defined by the FAA as an incident in which two aircraft come within 500 feet of each other, began to rise. In Austin in 2023, a FedEx cargo plane was 200 feet away from crashing into a Southwest Airlines passenger plane, after both were cleared to use the same runway on a foggy day. In New York, in 2023, an American Airlines plane nearly crashed into a Delta flight when they both crossed paths on the same runway.
Two JetBlue planes clipped wings on a deicing pad at Logan Airport last February.
“We’ve had a loss of personnel during the pandemic, pilots, air traffic controllers, technicians across the board,” Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation told Time. “And then since the pandemic was over, we’ve had an increase in traffic. That means more demand for personnel and hiring that has happened over the past few years.”
OK, so we know what a key part of the problem is. Now is the time to fix it.
We’ve splashed out a lot of money over the past few years on projects and policies with alleged payoffs coming down the road. The Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021 allocated $7.5 billion to increase charging stations for electric cars on interstate highways.
The electric cars that few are buying, let alone driving and recharging on jaunts across the country.
But people are flying every day, for business and personal reasons. They need to know they’re going to be safe in the air, and during takeoff and landing.
As President Trump and Elon Musk target wasteful spending by the federal government, they should funnel funds to projects that desperately need them, such as hiring more air traffic personnel and upgrading old systems.
Stories of collisions and near-misses scare the flying public, and that could have a chilling effect on the travel industry and economy as a whole.
Getting from Point A to Point B should be uneventful. “Whew, that was close” can’t be the new normal.
