The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) offered a new scapegoat on Thursday for who was at fault for the advisory system outage that left airports throughout the country in disarray the day prior: their own employees.
The FAA determined that a data file in the country’s Notices to Air Missions (NOTAM) database was “damaged by personnel who failed to follow procedures,” the agency said in a statement issued Thursday evening.
But reports that the FAA has long been employing extremely antiquated software have brought their claim into question.
On Thursday, CNN reported that “the Federal Aviation Administration software that failed Wednesday causing thousands of flight delays and cancellations is 30 years old and at least six years away from being updated,” citing a “government source familiar with the situation.”
The outage left huge numbers of passengers stranded as scheduling issues cascaded, ultimately leaving 10,945 flights delayed and 1,353 canceled, per flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Amid the American system’s meltdown, Russia – against whom the US has been secretly conducting a “sabotage campaign” via another NATO member state amid the Western military alliance’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine – was left to pick up the slack.
“Guided by the principles of international mutual assistance, [Russia’s Unified Air Traffic Management System]... provided the necessary assistance to the crews of aircraft performing transit flights through the border of the flight information region of these centers with the area control center in Anchorage (Alaska),” Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency wrote Wednesday.