House lawmakers have asked the Transportation inspector general to investigate an FAA "outage" that disrupted air traffic management across the country.
According to the FAA, a router problem occurred on the morning of Thursday, November 19, disrupting flight plan processing. It took four hours to fix and caused delays and grounded passengers.
The agency said the problem was caused by a "software configuration problem within the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure in Salt Lake City," and that during the outage air traffic controllers managed flight plan data manually, following FAA contingency plans.
The chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, James Oberstar, D-Minn., and Aviation Subcommittee chair Jeffy Costello, D-Ill., have asked the Transportation inspector general to investigate the system that failed – the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, which processes flight planning and relies on data from the telecommunications infrastructure.
