US Transport chief Buttigieg urges faster aviation computer upgrades

US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Monday said the government needs to “pick up the pace” on its efforts to modernize aviation computer systems after a pilot messaging database outage forced a nationwide groundstop on Jan 11. Buttigieg told Reuters in an interview that President Joe Biden’s administration plans to seek from Congress “the resources needed to accelerate these system changes” at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He said it was important to look beyond the recent outage that snarled more than 11,000 flights. “The broader context is aging systems and growing demand. I don’t want this to be ‘whack-a-mole’ where we figured out one flavor of problem on one system... only to face another one later on.” Last week the FAA told lawmakers it had revoked access to a pilot messaging database by contractor personnel who unintentionally deleted files in the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) database, forcing the first nationwide groundstop since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. “We’re working to make sure we can accelerate the NOTAM modernization but what we really need to do is pick up the pace on FAA’s wholesale system modernization -- all the way down to the backbone of how the data moves,” Buttigieg said. “This is something that obviously has been underway through multiple administrations. It’s not going to happen overnight.” The FAA told US lawmakers in a letter first reported by Reuters that the agency has adopted new safeguards to prevent a subsequent outage, including a one-hour delay in synchronizing databases that should prevent data errors from immediately reaching the backup database. “I’m confident that we have identified the specific chain of events that led to this specific problem” that led to the ground stop, Buttigieg said.<br/>