Barry Valentine, senior advisor at The Wicks Group and former FAA administrator, joined Cheddar News to discuss the massive system outage that caused thousands of flight delays.

Systemwide FAA Outage Caused Thousands of Flight Delays

the Federal Aviation Administration gradually resuming normal air traffic operations this afternoon after thousands of flights across the U. S. Were delayed or canceled earlier today due to a system outage at the F. A. A. The agency releasing a statement saying quote, we continue to look into the cause of the initial problem. End quote. And the White House says there's no evidence of a cyber attack but the president calling for a full investigation. So joining me now is Barry valentine a former FAA. Administrator and senior advisor at the Wicks group, an aviation consulting firm. Barry, it's great to have you on the show. And what do we know so far about this massive outage? Well, as I understand it, the system has returned to normal since it went down this morning. One of the unfortunate things about it was the timing. It happened early in the morning and just before large banks of flights. We've airports all around the country to start the day sir. And that obviously has a domino effect. It just felt across the country. So it'll take a little while for the biggest return to normal. But as again, as I understand that the system is back up and working well as a former FAA administrator. Barry, does this surprise you the extent to which this happened? It does in the sense that one of the things I think you would recognize is that early this morning, all of the news broadcasters who are trying to find out what the no damn system is in the first place. Most people have never heard of it because if you're not part of the aviation community, it's not something you use. So the very fact that people didn't know what it was suggests that this is something that's not happened for. It's very uncommon for it to happen. I don't know of any time in the past when that's ever occurred. Yes. So let's talk more about that. I mean the actual operation here that was impacted and if travelers should feel safe to fly it um when you conduct a flight, you obviously want to know if there are any circumstances along your route of flight or at your destination airport. Um that would be pertinent to safe operations of your flight. So the reason that every aircraft was grounded this morning, every commercial aircraft I should point out was grounded was because it's important for the air crews to know what's going on at the destination airport. There may not be anything going on. But you don't know that if the system is down and that's why it's important not to operate until you have that information available. Well, the biden administration barriers, I mentioned earlier ruling out a cyber attack but we've seen other systems of course been the target of hackers and scammers for years now. How protected are these systems to your knowledge at the FAA? So that they could prevent against any sort of cyber crime, I know the FAA has put a huge amount of time and resources into making sure all of its systems are as secure as can be from cyber attack or from hackers, whatever. And thus far, if history has shown that that's been very successful. All right, Barry valentine former FAA administrator, senior advisor at the Wigs Group, an aviation consulting firm. Barry. Thank you.