Dozens of flights out of OKC's Will Rogers airport delayed; FAA ends ground stop

The world’s largest aircraft fleet was grounded for hours by a cascading outage in a government system that delayed or cancelled thousands of flights across the U.S. on Wednesday.

The White House initially said that there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the outage that ruined travel plans for millions of passengers. President Joe Biden said Wednesday morning that he’s directed the Department of Transportation to investigate.

Whatever the cause, the outage revealed how dependent the world's largest economy is on air travel, and how dependent air travel is on an antiquated computer system called the Notice to Air Missions System, or NOTAM.

Dozens of flights out of Will Rogers Airport delayed

Nearly all flights scheduled to depart Oklahoma City early Wednesday were delayed or canceled. Only four flights left Oklahoma City at their scheduled time, according to the airport's website. All of those flights left at 6 a.m. or earlier.

As delayed flights began to take off from Will Rogers World Airport, later flights began being pushed back. As of 10:15 a.m. Wednesday, there were 22 scheduled departures throughout the day that were delayed or canceled.

Nura Mya, 34, had traveled to the Oklahoma City area to help his brother get settled for work and was heading back to Chicago via American Airlines after staying in a motel overnight.

"I was trying to leave on a flight earlier to get back to Chicago, but now they changed me to Dallas," Mya said. "I was supposed to leave at 11:30 a.m., but now I won't leave until 12:38 (p.m.)."

Staff in the Oklahoma City terminal could be heard around 9:10 a.m., calling out names of scheduled passengers whose flights were now set to leave at different times and imploring them to make it to the boarding gate on time.

Steven Bee, who said he doesn't fly much, was supposed to take a flight with American Airlines at 10:30 a.m. to Cleveland. It was instead delayed to 1 p.m.

While admitting it was an inconvenience, Bee said he was more understanding after being told the reason why.

"One of the employees made it sound like it was a system malfunction, like a crash," Bee said. "I could see how that would be a strain."

"It's nationwide," Mya said. "When you realize it's not just you or your one flight but it's everybody, I think it helps to give you perspective."

Van Vu, a 35-year-old technician, doesn't fly frequently, either. Wednesday was only the third flight she'd ever taken in her lifetime, and it was supposed to be with Southwest so that she could be with her family in Ohio.

But Vu's flight was cancelled, she said, and she'd moved to a different flight time of 12:45 p.m.

"It's not the worst thing that could happen, but I am going to be sitting here for two more hours," Vu said.

Dale Ferguson, however, said he was "pretty bothered" after his 11 a.m. flight to Houston was cancelled and he found himself awaiting another flight later that afternoon.

"It makes me wonder what's happened with the FAA," Ferguson said. "They're supposed to be on top of everything, but it just seems like stuff like this is happening more and more."

What happened to the FAA's computer system?

Before commencing a flight, pilots are required to consult NOTAMs, which list potential adverse impacts on flights, from runway construction to the potential for icing. The system used to be telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for the information, but has moved online.

The NOTAM system broke down late Tuesday, leading to more than 1,000 flight cancellations and more than 6,000 delayed flights by 11 a.m. Wednesday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.

The chaos is expected to grow as backups compound. More than 21,000 flights were scheduled to take off in the U.S. today, mostly domestic trips, and about 1,840 international flights expected to fly to the U.S., according to aviation data firm Cirium.

Longtime aviation insiders could not recall an outage of such magnitude caused by a technology breakdown. Some compared it to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the terror attacks of September 2001.

“Periodically there have been local issues here or there, but this is pretty significant historically,” said Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines and now a consultant in Minneapolis.

Campbell said there has long been concern about the Federal Aviation Administration’s technology, and not just the NOTAM system.

“So much of their systems are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable but they are out of date,” he said.

John Cox, a former airline pilot and aviation safety expert, said there has been talk in the aviation industry for years about trying to modernize the NOTAM system, but he did not know the age of the servers that the FAA uses.

He couldn’t say whether a cyberattack was possible.

“I’ve been flying 53 years. I’ve never heard the system go down like this,” Cox said. “So something unusual happened.”

According to FAA advisories, the NOTAM system failed at 8:28 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday preventing new or amended notices from being distributed to pilots. The FAA resorted to a telephone hotline to keep departures flying overnight, but as daytime traffic picked up it overwhelmed the telephone backup system.

The FAA ordered all departing flights grounded early Wednesday morning, affecting all passenger and shipping flights.

Some medical flights could get clearance and the outage did not impact any military operations or mobility.

Flights for the U.S. military’s Air Mobility Command, were not affected.

Biden said Wednesday morning that he was briefed by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

“I just spoke to Buttigieg. They don’t know what the cause is. But I was on the phone with him about 10 minutes,” Biden said. “I told him to report directly to me when they find out.

European flights into the U.S. appeared to be largely unaffected.

Irish carrier Aer Lingus said services to the U.S. continue, and Dublin Airport’s website showed that its flights to Newark, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles were running on schedule.

“Aer Lingus plan to operate all transatlantic flights as scheduled today,” the carrier said in a prepared statement. “We will continue to monitor but we do not anticipate any disruption to our services arising from the technical issue in the United States.”

It was the latest headache for travelers in the U.S. who faced flight cancellations over the holidays amid winter storms and a breakdown with staffing technology at Southwest Airlines. They also ran into long lines, lost baggage, and cancellations and delays over the summer as travel demand roared back from the COVID-19 pandemic and ran into staffing cutbacks at airports and airlines in the U.S. and Europe.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Flights delayed at Will Rogers Airport Wednesday due to FAA outage