FAA delays: NOTAM system failure ‘pretty significant,’ professor says

Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Frank Nagle discusses the FAA system failure that led to flight delays on Wednesday as well as the state of aviation infrastructure in the U.S.

Video Transcript

RACHELLE AKUFFO: The airline industry was dealt a blow this morning when the Federal Aviation Administration paused flights across the US now after the FAA suffered an outage of the system responsible for sending essential aviation information to pilots. Domestic takeoffs have since resumed. Now there's only been a few times in the US where flights on a mass scale have been grounded, including in 1981, when labor unrest led to a massive strike. That brought about 35% of the nation's commercial flights to a halt.

But it wasn't until September 11 of 2001 when the US aviation first, for the first time in history, put a ground stop on all traffic. Well, here to discuss the latest on this issue, and of course, all things digital infrastructure, is Frank Nagel, Harvard Business School assistant professor of Business Administration. Good to see you here. So obviously, now, flights are starting to resume. We're seeing this domino effect starting to resume. But put this in context for us. How significant is a failure on this scale?

FRANK NAGLE: Thanks, Rachelle. It's great to be here with you. And it is pretty significant, but thankfully, they were able to recover and get the systems back up and running fairly quickly. So the latest numbers I saw were over 5,000 flights delayed, nearly 1,000 flights canceled. There you go, up to 6,000 now flights delayed. And the trick with this, of course, is that it's a complex structure and a complex system. And so it's not just about those flights, but-- that were delayed during the outage of the system, but instead, there's going to be delays all day. And hopefully, we will be able to catch up.

Obviously, the airline industry, we saw just a week or two ago, dealing with these types of issues-- in that case, a large snowstorm. Some airlines did better than others. And so I think we'll see the same type of thing today, as the various airlines try to get back to their regularly scheduled flights.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And thankfully, this didn't happen bang smack in the middle of the holiday season. That would have been a nightmare. But I want to ask you about the system, this NOTAM system, notice to air missions. And what it essentially does is warns pilots about issues, whether in the sky, hazards in the sky, hazards on the ground as well. What questions does this raise about the safety of the system and perhaps the need for some sort of subsequent backup systems as well?

FRANK NAGLE: Yeah, so one of the good things about these types of critical infrastructure, not just airlines, but-- or air traffic, but all sorts of systems that we rely on for these types of critical tasks, they do have backups of various types, right? And so, indeed, this particular system, you know, it tells pilots about various kind of things they need to be worried about, closed runways at airports or obstacles near airfields, even hazards in the air. So if there's-- NASA's launching a rocket or if there's an air show somewhere. So it's important information for the pilots to know.

Now, this is certainly different than things like the air traffic control system that actually keeps track of all the planes that are in the air and tells them where to go and when to-- how to make sure they don't run into each other. So a different-- this isn't the kind of a primary most important system, but it is a very important system to letting pilots know what they have to worry about. And so, from that perspective, I think it was very good news that they were able to get this back up and running fairly quickly.

I haven't seen any detailed information about what the issue was. It doesn't, at least at the moment, there's no evidence of it being a cyberattack or something more nefarious like that. Usually, these types of things where somebody put an update into the system, and it didn't play nicely with the existing code or the existing system. And so things went haywire. That may well be the case. But we'll have to kind of wait and see exactly what happened.

But, indeed, as you said, kind of having backups and redundancies for these types of critical infrastructure is obviously becoming increasingly important, as we face both human made bugs and things like that, but also potential cyber attacks from adversaries.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And as you mentioned there, I mean, we saw from the White House Press Secretary, she tweeted that there's no evidence of a cyber attack at this point. President Biden aware of the situation and expecting the Department of Transportation to conduct a full investigation into the causes. But when you look at the sort of infrastructure that's behind this, is this something that is in need of an overhaul? Should we be more forward thinking from this point?

FRANK NAGLE: Yeah, so I think absolutely is the answer. Different types of infrastructure, we can think about the energy grid, or in this case, the airline systems or even things like the financial system and the backbones of the financial system and how that operates, the problem is, is that a lot of this technology was developed 40, 50 years ago. And it's still, in some cases, it's maintained fairly well.

But the number of folks that actually understand how the system works is slowly declining. People are retiring. New folks come into these organizations and don't know exactly how the old systems work. I actually, in my old consulting days, worked on some of the federal tax systems with the IRS. And we actually had to pull some people out of retirement to help update the systems because none of the folks that were there knew kind of the intricacies of the operation.

So as we kind of shift from some of the older, critical infrastructure to a more heavily digital based infrastructure that's increasingly built on open technologies, the types of updates and the maintenance and everything like that is only going to become even more important than it used to be. And when we think about air traffic and all these types of critical infrastructure, usually they're built to be fail safe.

And so that if they fail, they fail into a kind of a safe mode so that we have kind of what happened today, that flights are grounded rather than people being up in the air and not knowing what's going on and not knowing some of the risks that they face. So that's a good thing.

But we have to think more about how we implement the maintenance and the updates and really overhaul the infrastructure. And I know there's an FAA infrastructure bill that's working its way through Congress at the moment that would hopefully help to address this particular type of problem in the future.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Well, certainly putting it in the spotlight. We'll see how fast that bill goes from this point. A big thank you there to Frank Nagle, Harvard Business School assistant professor of Business Administration. Thank you for joining me.