Today both the United States and Canada experienced a rather bizarre and uncommon Air Traffic Control (ATC) outage resulting in hundreds of delayed flights. In the United States there was a brief issue in the early morning resulting in the Notice To Air Missions (NOTAMs) system being offline for a few hours. NOTAMS provide large and small aircraft relevant crucial information about an airport or select route including important things such as runway closures and navigation system statuses. Flights across the country were grounded until 9AM while the FAA worked diligently to resolve the issue. Canada faced a similar issue this morning with their NOTAM system failing to display newley posted NOTAMs. The issue was resolved by midday. Nav Canada does not believe these issues are linked to the United States NOTAM outages. Both countries have announced that they will be looking into the issues further and have stated that there is no compromise to aviation safety.
NAV Canada Experiences Temporary Air Traffic Control Outages
