All domestic flights have been grounded in the US due to a major failure in a national aviation security computer system.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said early Wednesday, US time, that the NOTAMS (Notice to Air Missions) system had gone down.
NOTAMS provides pilots with vital safety information before take-off and during flight.
At around 7am New York (11pm AEDT) time the FAA announced it was looking to “fully restore” NOTAMS and aircraft movements were restricted. However, around 7.30am, he said he had “ordered” all domestic flights to “pause” while he sorted out the problem.
Other crucial safety systems, such as radar and air traffic control, are not affected.
International and domestic flights are affected, and passengers in Paris and Madrid are complaining about the cancellation of their trips to the US.
Some passengers wrote that they were stuck on the tarmac at Los Angeles airport for hours.
Images from flight-tracking websites have shown substantially fewer planes in the skies over major US cities. In New York, one of the country’s busiest airspaces with three main airports, there were a handful of flights in the sky at 7.30am on Wednesday (11.30pm AEDT).
Websites have also shown many diverted flights. For example, several United planes bound for New York were diverted to Washington DC
“The FAA is working to restore its warning system to the air mission system,” the organization said in the middle of rush hour in the United States.
“We are performing final validation checks and repopulating the system now. National Airspace System operations are affected.”
He then updated that statement by grounding the flights.
“The FAA has directed airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9am Eastern Time (1am Thursday AEDT) to allow the agency to validate the integrity of safety and flight”.
Several passengers complained of being stranded as chaos erupted at airports around the world.
NOTAMS are alerts given to pilots about potential hazards during their flights.
They could include information about en-route flight restrictions, military exercises, obstacles near airfields such as cranes, any malfunctions at airports such as closed runways or taxiways, hazardous conditions and even large flocks of birds that could cause a danger to aircraft.
US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he had been in contact with the FAA about the safety issue.
“The FAA is working to resolve this issue quickly and safely so air traffic can resume normal operations and will continue to provide updates.”
Even before the FAA grounded flights, many major airlines had decided to voluntarily ground planes due to the lack of NOTAMS.
United Airlines, one of the largest in the United States, said all its planes would remain grounded until at least 10 a.m. New York time.
By 7am 1100 flights had been delayed in the US. The FAA manages about 45,000 flights a day in the US with 5,400 in the sky at any given time. Every day nearly three million people are on a flight in the US.