NOTAM System Failure: Not What-If but When?
Over ten years ago, I posted a short recommendation that aerodrome operators should consider the risk of a NOTAM system failure. While even I may have considered such a thing a bit of a black swan event, this scenario recently played out in the United States and Canada. Obviously, plenty of people in the FAA and NAV Canada will be working on avoiding a repeat of these events*, aerodrome operators should take the time to review want happened for their own lessons learned.
Ground Stop USA
Late on 10 January 2023, a nationwide outage in the US NOTAM occurred. This led to the declaration of a complete ground stop - meaning any aircraft on the ground had to hold position and wait. As you can imagine, this resulted thousands of cancelled and delayed flights.
VASAviation has posted a great video of ATC recordings of the ground stop going into effect.
Early indications are that a system update was implemented without following procedures. These procedures are likely to be extremely important given how old, from a policy and standards point of view, the NOTAM system, how much it is under pressure generally, and the onward march of technological development in nearly every other aspect of aviation.
Oh, Canada
The next day, Canada’s NOTAM system went down for a much shorter period with their Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP) reporting no delays or cancellations. They also report that the cause of their failure is not linked to the US system going down.
Preparedness
In my original post, I made a guarded suggestion that a NOTAM system failure should be in your aerodrome’s risk register. Today, I’m less cagey about it.
I would thoroughly recommend that, at your next safety-related meeting, you role-play such a failure and consider the impact on your aerodrome. Impacts could include (I’m sure there are more):
Aircraft being held on the ground while inbound aircraft keep coming leading to capacity issues.
Critical safety information may not be passed on to aircraft in a timely manner.
Stakeholders’ crisis management teams might kick into overdrive and that might impact you.
Increased stress levels might cause marginal operations to buckle.
The results of this role-play, whether low-key or more formal, should be documented and identified actions tracked as if they are a hazard report or audit finding. These actions may include training, aerodrome manual and procedure amendments, shoring up communication systems, and so on.
* Other ANSPs around the world are probably looking into their own systems as well.
