Aviation warning system that crashed was already a pain for pilots

The US aviation warning system that crashed for more than an hour Wednesday traces back its origins to ocean-faring ships and has been under continuous reforms for years, experts say. At least one aviation industry group has called for it to be replaced altogether. The FAA grounded all flights blaming an unspecified failure in the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system. NOTAM issues a near-constant stream of acronyms and abbreviations to alert pilots to a host of potential dangers, everything from parachuters and bad weather to legal airspace restrictions and flocks of birds. By Wednesday evening, the agency had pinpointed the problem to a damaged database file, and there is no evidence of a cyberattack, it said. The White House also said it saw no signs that the NOTAM system was taken down as a result of a cyberattack. The Department of Transportation was conducting a “full investigation” into its root cause. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the outage lasted approximately an hour and a half, but the FAA’s website that lists NOTAMs was only intermittently accessible through Wednesday afternoon. Regardless of the cause of the failure, the NOTAM system has long been a source of frustration for pilots and others in the aviation industry who say it overloads them with information that’s irrelevant to their flight and makes it difficult to identify actually useful information. NOTAM notices rely on a complex string of codes and abbreviations that share information like dates and locations of potential issues for a pilot to read before a flight. One industry collective of around 8,000 flight professionals, the OPS Group, has made streamlining the NOTAM system a key priority. The group runs a website called Death To NOTAMS. NOTAMs are modeled after a similar warning system for ships, which the US Navy began publishing in print in 1869. Aviation authorities began issuing NOTAM warnings via telecommunications channels in 1947.<br/>