'Pack your patience today!': Canadians frustrated by NOTAM-related flight delays in U.S.

Many passengers in Canada faced a tough morning as an outage in the U.S. caused massive delays in Canadian airports

Abhya Adlakha
·Editor, Yahoo News Canada
·5 min read
1

Many passengers in Canada faced a tough morning as an outage in the U.S. caused massive delays in Canadian airports on the east coast.

On Wednesday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stated that operations were gradually resuming after an overnight outage of Notice to Air Missions System.

More than 7,300 flights were delayed and 1,100 canceled according to the FlightAware website in the first national grounding of flights in about two decades, industry officials said.

The FAA uses NOTAM alerts — also known as Notice to Air Mission, to alert flights and pilots about hazards in the air or on the ground, such as closed runways, airspace restrictions, or navigational signal disruptions.

The outage has caused delays for U.S.-bound flights mostly on the east coast of Canada, with Toronto Pearson Airport advising passengers to “check the status of their flight before heading to the airport.”

Due to this, many passengers across Toronto and Montreal were stranded in the morning at airports—with no news or explanation for why flights were grounded.

Although the FAA resumed its flights around 9 a.m. ET, many expect travel chaos to continue for the coming days with thousands of flights rescheduled.

Canadian systems also affected Wednesday morning

Shortly after the United States resumed operations, NAV Canada said that Canadian flights were grappling with a major computer outage just a few hours after.

However, the outage hitting Canadian systems managed to not cause any delays.

“NAV Canada’s Canadian NOTAM entry system is currently experiencing an outage affecting newly issued NOTAMs, and we are working to restore function,” the organization wrote in a tweet.

“We are not currently experiencing any delays related to this outage. We are assessing impacts to our operations and will provide updates as soon as they are available.”

NAV believes that the outage isn't related to the FAA incident earlier today, but said in another tweet that they are investigating the "cause".

People react to the outage