The Federal Aviation istration (FAA) said Monday it plans to deploy a new messaging database for pilots by September, following a series of outages that raised safety concerns.
The FAA said it has selected CGI Federal to work on modernizing the NOTAM system. In January 2023, a NOTAM system failure grounded more than 11.000 flights in the first U.S. shutdown since 2001.
The NOTAM system most recently failed on March 22 for more than three hours due to a hardware issue. The system also experienced an outage on February 1.
CGI plans to deliver the NOTAM Modernization Service by July and the FAA is targeting implementation by September.
The value of the contract was not disclosed by the FAA. National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) President Nick Daniels told Congress in March that the NOTAM system will cost millions of dollars to replace.
“At a minimum, the FAA will need $154 million just to conduct more research on a replacement NOTAM system, but it needs $354 million to replace the NOTAM system,” Daniels said.
Earlier this month, a bipartisan group of six U.S. lawmakers led by Senators Amy Klobuchar and Shelley Moore Capito noted that Congress ed legislation requiring the FAA to implement a modernized NOTAM system and a backup system by September 2024.
NOTAMs, which stands for Notice to Airman, are aeronautical information issued to pilots and airports for safe flight operations. NOTAMs detail temporary changes such as runway closures, airspace restrictions, obstructions to pilots, flight plans, and more. More than 4 million NOTAMs are issued annually in the United States, according to the FAA.
The modernization will provide near real-time data exchange, hosted securely in the clouds.
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