The disruption on Wednesday was caused by an outage to a system that the Federal Aviation Administration uses to send real-time safety alerts to pilots.
Also Read– Bed Bath & Beyond is closing dozens of stores in 2023 — see the full list
Those NOTAM alerts — short for Notice to Air Mission — are crucial to planning flights and are used to share information about hazards in the air or on the ground, such as closed runways, airspace restrictions and navigational signal disruptions.
Also Read – Biden administration weighs nationwide ban on gas stoves: report
NOTAMs, which until recently stood for the anachronistically gendered Notice to Airmen, typically include technical language that can be difficult to parse for anyone without experience reading them. They were created in 1947 and modeled after similar messages used to alert ship captains to hazards at sea.
