Poplar Bluff Municipal Airport manager Gary Pride described the recent FAA computer software glitch that reportedly grounded flights nationwide on Wednesday as a “logistical quagmire.”
“What the FAA told us is that it was primarily just a routine software update that went bad,” Pride said.
The software upgrade, Pride said, is to attempt to make it less likely to fail or be hacked in the future. However, the update did not take and it erased all of the data that was stored in what’s referred to as the NOTAM file, which is a written notification issued to pilots before a flight, advising them of circumstances relating to the state of flying.
“Those NOTAMs are notes to pilots about specific airports over safety concerns, those may be the taxiway, like Alpha is under construction and is not available today, or it may be that there’s an obstruction that is supposed to have a blinking light on it that’s close to the airport, so it’s various routine safety messages that all pilots are supposed to check before they depart one airport to go to another,” said Pride.
FAA reports state that the glitch did ground all commercial passenger flights and any general aviation flight that had a flight plan.
“They would not allow them to depart,” Pride said. “Now any flight that was already in the air was allowed to continue.”
The Poplar Bluff Municipal Airport had two flights scheduled to depart that morning that departed just a little behind schedule, Pride said. But because of fog, the airport was already operating under instrument flight rule conditions, meaning no aircraft could leave without a flight plan.
“At 8 a.m. that morning, they were trying to reboot and stuff and by 8 o’clock, they had released general aviation aircraft,” Pride said. “After that was your large commercial passenger aircraft like United and those carriers. By about 9:30 a.m. the software was beginning to take so they allowed flights to slowly take off. To get the market back up it would take several hours for it to get back up and running again.”
Pride said one issue often taken for granted is “there’s always aircraft in the air like 60,000 people are in the air at any given moment, there were roughly eight or nine thousand flights that were canceled over the nighttime.”
Another issue Pride mentioned was space.
“The way the air system is, it’s always on the move,” Pride said. “At your extreme hubs like Atlanta and Chicago, places like Dallas and Fort Worth, there’s only so much room to park those airplanes right now.”
This means some aircraft had to be diverted to different locations to get them on the ground.
“They had a little bit of experience with this from 911 and COVID, in particular, COVID because that shut so much down,” said Pride.
The issue now is even small airports like the Poplar Bluff Municipal Airport have three or four NOTAM messages pretty much all the time, Pride said.
“There are 3,000 to 3,500 airports in the United States,” Pride said. “All of those have NOTAMs and your bigger airports may have as many as 30 to 50 NOTAMs. All of those have to be reloaded now because they lost them all.”
Pride said under the current circumstances, there’s a lot more personal conversation going on.
“The system (NOTAM) was electronic so you could pull it up and look at it, you didn’t have to talk to anyone,” Pride said. “Until all of that data gets put back in a pilot going to an airport will need to physically call and say okay, what are the NOTAMs that I need to know with this particular aircraft and they have to physically recall that until it gets rectified.”
Pride said the matter is still slowing things down a bit, “but the FAA is adamant that they were not hacked.
“I get the same emails that Lambert St. Louis gets, you know, in regard to that, I’m an airport just like they are and I got around six throughout the night, then a flurry of three or four that morning as things were beginning to get corrected.”
One of the bigger concerns to the flying public, Pride said, is the odds of it happening again.
“General aviation where you have private planes or chartered planes and stuff, that whole environment is much different than your commercial passenger,” Pride said. “The commercial market has been horrible over the past year, with delays and cancellations and staffing and different mishaps. It would really make one pause if they were going to try to fly commercially somewhere because you have a very good chance of not getting where you want to go in a timely manner.
“It’s bound to kind of stagnate the travel industry because of the issues that seem to happen every couple of weeks.”
Overall, Pride said he felt the grounding of all flights was a bit of a “knee-jerk reaction” because air travel in the United States is extremely safe.
“And it’s that way for a reason. There’s a lot of efforting that goes on behind the scenes now from maintenance of the aircraft, to the procedures that are in place for flight plans, arrivals and departures,” said Pride.
“So I guess if you’re going to have a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction it’s better to do it on the side of more caution.”