'Somewhat unprecedented' flight stoppage another hurdle for Chicago flyers
CHICAGO (CBS) – Wednesday's failure of the Federal Aviation Administration systems that lead to a nationwide stoppage of all departing planes was unlike anything the country had seen in more than two decades, according to experts.
CBS 2'S Chris Tye went to O'Hare International Airport where the trickle-down effect was still being felt.
Insiders said that trickle-down is likely to last until noon on Thursday.
A nationwide pause like Wednesday's hasn't happened since Sept. 11, 2001, leading to tough new questions for the FAA and new scheduling hurdles for Chicago travelers.
When the font next to customers' flights turn from white to a delayed yellow, they've joined the club of Ellen Slots.
"But I have a flight out of Miami tomorrow, so if I don't get home today, it's going to be a disaster," Slots said.
Her four-hour delay was tapping into a dwindling reservoir of good will for an airline industry that's had a turbulent two weeks.
"It seems like it's getting more challenging to get to end results," she said.
Peter Greenberg, the CBS News Travel Editor, said was this was "somewhat unprecedented."
"This was the largest ground stop the FAA has ordered for the entire country since 9/11," he said.
Today's 90-minute ground stop from 6:20 a.m. to 7:50 a.m. Chicago time resulted in:
- More than 7,500 flights delayed nationwide.
- Includes 37% of all outbound Midway Airport flights and 29% of outgoing O'Hare flights.
The problem was with "notice to air mission alerts," which sends real-time safety alerts to pilots in the cockpit.
"We are dealing with systems that are antiquated that tend to break down and can't be rebooted or systems that have no redundancy or no backup systems," Greenberg said.
He added talks of updating that system have been going on for decades. While Wednesday's stoppage lasted only 90 minutes, and some Chicago travelers took it in stride.
"Things appear to be moving now," said Bill Gergen, a Chicago-based traveler. "Planes are boarding, taking off. It'll be OK."
The national grid of aircrafts won't be back to normal for about 20 more hours past Wednesday afternoon.
"We expect with the ripple effect to last until around noon tomorrow easter time, weather notwithstanding," Greenberg said.
There's no evidence of a cyberattack causing this failure.
Greenberg said the catch 22 in upgrading the system that failed on Wednesday is by the time Congress approves funding for an overhaul, the new systems installed are no longer state of the art.
In a statement Wednesday afternoon, the FAA said it is continuing a "thorough review to determine the root cause of the 'Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage. Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file."