Originally Posted by
Skywards747
I still don't understand why FAA as the regulator is still allowed to operate the air traffic system. It should at least be operated as a public-private partnership such as NATS (UK) and Nav Canada. FAA is under a political appointed leadership and under such conditions, the budget allocations are usually diverted to politically correct projects instead of much needed modernizations.
Bad news for Canada if the following report is true:
NAV Canada, a nonprofit corporation that serves as the FAA’s Canadian counterpart, said today that it had also experienced its own brief NOTAM system outage. Brian Boudreau, a spokesperson for the company, says it was investigating the “root cause of the failure” but that it did not believe the issue was related to the FAA’s earlier trouble.
https://www.wired.com/story/faa-notam-outage/
Often such partnerships are great and often they are terrible. It gives a chance for both sides to swap blame while the system burns to the ground.
Canadian aviation officials said an alert system that provides airlines with important safety information went down less than two hours after a similar system in the U.S. was restored on Wednesday.The system outage lasted for nearly three hours. NAV Canada's Notam entry system went down at about 10:20 a.m. ET and was restored at roughly 1:15 pm, said Vanessa Adams, spokeswoman for the Ottawa-based not-for-profit organization.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/faa...ettE6DcOampCBX
This has opened a can of worms on the NOTAM concept, specifically the difficulty in interpreting them and the expressed belief this is an FAA side problem. I don't see why a company cannot create a parser for NOTAMs to suss out just the applicable items for a flight - except, of course, any misinterpretation would leave that party liable if there was a bad outcome.
Lots of people with grudges and a bunch of opportunists are going to all pile on. I'm sure it will come out so much better with the newly emboldened data management experts hopping into action.