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1 1 (January 17, 2023)

handle is hein.crs/govekgt0001 and id is 1 raw text is: L a Congressional R fesearch Service- Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA's) Troubled NOTAM System Has Been on Congress's Radar for Years January 17, 2023 In the early morning of January 11, 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA's) Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system failed. The messages or NOTAMs disseminated by the system frequently are referred to as Notices to Airmen. They convey critical flight safety information to pilots and aircraft dispatchers. NOTAMs consist of information about the current conditions and hazards associated with airports, airspace, navigational aids, and air traffic services. They include safety-critical details, such as possible airport construction activity, and associated hazards, such as temporary cranes or other aerial obstructions, possible runway closures, and outages of facilities and equipment used for inflight navigation, communications, and aircraft tracking. The NOTAM system also conveys information about temporary flight restrictions, including airspace restrictions imposed for national security reasons. This information is pooled from a variety of sources, including FAA's flight data center, and airports and other aviation facilities throughout the country. Without access to these data, pilots, who are responsible for obtaining and analyzing all data relevant to a planned flight, were unable to make informed safety decisions during the outage. With the system unavailable for several hours, FAA imposed a ground stop halting most morning airline flights. The NOTAM system was restored gradually over several hours, as the database of recently submitted notices had to be reconstituted, and extensive flight delays continued throughout the day. NOTAMs are disseminated in a variety of ways. They are directly accessible through the NOTAM website. They are also relayed through FAA's System Wide Information Management (SWIM) program, a net-centric platform for aviation system data sharing that is a key component of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) air traffic infrastructure modernization initiative. Most large airlines now rely on the SWIM platform to obtain NOTAM and other flight service data feeds in their flight operations, and dispatch centers and use these data to evaluate operational safety of their scheduled flights. While a number of larger business aircraft operators also are relying on SWIM for flight data, smaller general aviation aircraft operators primarily obtain NOTAMs, along with aviation weather briefings, through FAA's contractor-operated Flight Service or through a variety of third-party flight planning tools. Flight Service provides NOTAMs, aviation weather, and flight planning resources either Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov IN12078 CRS INSIGHT Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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