FAA Blames Flight Catastrophe on "Damaged Database File"

Mindy Cohn 

After a computer outage grounded thousands of flights Wednesday morning, as reported in Rockland Daily here,   the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has yet to find the root cause. 

The FAA explained that there was a failure in the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which contains crucial information for those involved in flight operations. However, why the failure occurred still needs to be clarified. 

The source of the problem was reportedly a single engineer who made an error with a file transfer. during routine scheduled maintenance. 

"The FAA is continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the NOTAM system outage," the FAA said in a statement,  "Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack. The FAA is working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again."