By The FirstTransportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg dodged criticism this week after the FAA grounded all domestic flights in the United States, telling reporters “glitches happen all the time!”
“The FAA is continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage,” the FAA said in a statement. “Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack.”
“One of the questions we need to look at right now, and one of the things I’m asking from FAA, is what’s the state of the art in this form of message traffic?” Buttigieg told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell earlier Wednesday. “And again, how is it possible for there to be this level of disruption?”
“This is an incredibly complex system,” Buttigieg said. “So glitches or complications happen all the time. But we can’t allow them to ever lead to this level of disruption, and we won’t ever allow them to lead to a safety problem.”
