Brent Pin­heiro

Caribbean Air­lines and the Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go said flight op­er­a­tions lo­cal­ly were un­af­fect­ed by yes­ter­day’s ma­jor Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Ad­min­is­tra­tion (FAA) sys­tem out­age in the Unit­ed States.

Overnight Tues­day, the FAA’s No­tice to Air Mis­sions sys­tem suf­fered an out­age, trig­ger­ing sev­er­al can­cel­la­tions and de­lays across the US.

Ac­cord­ing to the FAA, the NO­TAM sys­tem “alerts pi­lots about closed run­ways, equip­ment out­ages, and oth­er po­ten­tial haz­ards along a flight route or at a lo­ca­tion that could af­fect the flight.”

How­ev­er, the FAA was forced to or­der a ground stop for all do­mes­tic US flights “to al­low the agency to val­i­date the in­tegri­ty of flight and safe­ty in­for­ma­tion” af­ter the out­age oc­curred. (See page 14)

The na­tion­wide ground stop was lift­ed just af­ter 10 am yes­ter­day.

While nor­mal flight op­er­a­tions slow­ly re­sumed af­ter the sys­tem was put back on­line, the sys­tem out­age caused dis­rup­tions across US air­ports, with flight track­ing web­site FlightAware.com re­port­ing over 9,306 de­layed flights to, from and with­in the US and over 2,777 can­celled.

Unit­ed Air­lines im­me­di­ate­ly is­sued a trav­el waiv­er, al­low­ing af­fect­ed pas­sen­gers to re­book their flights. Some trav­ellers head­ing to T&T from the US ex­pe­ri­enced de­lays on do­mes­tic con­nect­ing flights, as air­lines worked to get planes in and out of crowd­ed gates.

The FAA said it will con­tin­ue to in­ves­ti­gate the cause of the out­age.

Ac­cord­ing to White House press sec­re­tary Karine Jean-Pierre, US Pres­i­dent Joe Biden was briefed on the is­sue and there was no ev­i­dence yet of a cy­ber­at­tack.

The US De­part­ment of Trans­porta­tion will con­duct a full in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the caus­es.