By THE CENTER SQUARE STAFF
(The Center Square) — The Federal Aviation Administration is allowing domestic flights to take off after a system malfunction grounded all passenger flights earlier Wednesday.
The hours-long pause, however, continues to cause flight delays throughout the U.S.
The FAA on Wednesday delayed all domestic flights until 6 a.m. Pacific/9 a.m. Eastern after a safety system malfunction.
“The FAA is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System,” the agency announced in a tweet. “We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now. Operations across the National Airspace System are affected. We will provide frequent updates as we make progress.”
More than 1,000 flights were affected by the problem with the system that is used to alert flight operations personnel about essential information.
President Joe Biden “has been briefed by the Secretary of Transportation this morning on the FAA system outage,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted. “There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point, but the President directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into the causes. The FAA will provide regular updates.”
The Santa Barbara Airport didn’t experience the level of halt that other airports did, said Angi Daus, marketing supervisor. She told the News-Press that was because of cancellations already in the airport’s flight schedule.
“We were a lucky airport in that as of 5 a.m. all equipment was back up, and running and flights were back on by 6:15 a.m.,” Ms. Daus said in an email. “However, we always feel the impacts of larger airports being a small hub. And so, as you can see from our flight schedule on our website (flysba.santabarbaraca.gov), we are feeling the impacts of that issue from this morning.
“We do not have any system or technical outages or issues and recommend all passengers contact their airlines for the most up-to-date information on their flight status,” she said.
News-Press Managing Editor Dave Mason contributed to this report.
