Delta CEO Calls for More FAA Funding After Outage

25.08.2023 - 14:32 / skift.com / Pete Buttigieg / Ed Bastian / Delta Air Lines / Edward Russell / Phil Washington / For More / Delta

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian made a call to action for more funding and investment in the U.S. air traffic control system after an outage Wednesday disrupted more than 11,000 flights across the country.

“It’s very clear that there has to be a call to action amongst our political leaders, the Congress and the White House, to fund and properly provide the FAA the resources they need to do the job,” Bastian said during the Atlanta-based carrier’s fourth-quarter results call on Friday.

The flight disruptions occurred after a corrupted file forced an overnight reboot of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, system that communicates safety notices to pilots. The system is reportedly 30 years old. The regulator instituted a nationwide ground stop for all departing flights at 7 a.m. EST on Wednesday when it could not confirm that messages were being relayed to crews. The ground stop was lifted by 9 a.m EST but not before flight delays and cancellations had rippled across the country.

Delta and its affiliates delayed at least 1,585 flights and cancelled another 94 flights on Wednesday, data from flight tracking website FlightAware show.

The FAA outage came less than two weeks after technology was cited as the main cause of a meltdown at Southwest Airlines over the Christmas and New Year holidays. That event, while triggered by bad weather, resulted in the cancellation of more than 16,700 flights and cost Southwest as much as $825 million in the fourth quarter.

Calls to modernize the U.S. air traffic control system are not new. The FAA unveiled a plan, dubbed NextGen, to upgrade the system with modern technology in the mid-2000s. However, limited funding from Congress, as well as competing proposals including ones to privatize air traffic control in the U.S., have hamstrung the program that is now targeted for completion around 2030. The FAA budget is subject to renewal every five years during what is known as reauthorization; the next reauthorization is due this year.

The NOTAM system outage “gives us a really important data point, at a really important moment, to understand what we’re going to need moving forward,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday when asked about FAA reauthorization.

Leaders in Congress, however, have used the outage to call for more accountability at the FAA and DOT — rather than more funding. Criticisms include ones of President Biden’s nominee to lead the FAA, Denver Airport chief Phil Washington, who is seen by some as having too little aviation experience for the job.

Bastian, while not commenting on Washington’s nomination, was clear of the benefits he sees from additional funding for the FAA: “There’s no question