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Major U.S. airlines like Delta (NYSE:DAL), Southwest (NYSE:LUV) and United (NASDAQ:UAL) expect operations to return to normal on Thursday after a disruption stranded travelers across the country. When all was said and done, nearly 12,000 flights were delayed or canceled on Wednesday – within, into, or out of the United States. It also appeared to be the first nationwide grounding of domestic traffic in over two decades, with the last following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
What happened? The Federal Aviation Administration traced the outage to a damaged database file on the computer system that generates alerts called NOTAMs, or Notice to Air Missions. Those notifications must be reviewed by pilots and airline dispatchers before takeoff, as they include details about bad weather, runway closures or nearby airspace activity. Officials also noted that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack, though a similar system interruption occurred in Canada on the same day.
Many of those systems “are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable, but they are out of date,” explained Tim Campbell, a former executive of air operations at American Airlines (NASDAQ:AAL).
Outlook: The U.S. aviation sector is still likely to struggle on Thursday, with 61 cancellations and 472 delays as of 5:00 a.m. ET, but many hope that things will clear up later in the day. The disruption follows another turbulent period for the air travel industry, which resulted in government investigations. Over the holidays, Southwest Airlines (LUV) cancelled thousands of flights over the span of several days, citing problems with a legacy system that couldn’t keep up with crew scheduling changes.
Image and article originally from seekingalpha.com. Read the original article here.