WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th January, 2023) The US House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill requiring the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to establish a task force to improve its Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system following an outage that grounded flights across the United States earlier this month.
House lawmakers passed the NOTAM Improvement Act along bipartisan lines in a vote of 424-4, with two-thirds support required for passage.
The bill requires that the FAA administrator establish a task force on NOTAM system improvement no later than 180 days after enactment. The task force will be responsible for reviewing existing NOTAM methods and providing recommendations to improve the system.
The task force will also be mandated to provide a report to Congress on its findings.
Earlier this month, an outage in the NOTAM system grounded flights across the US. The outage was linked to a damaged database file, not a cyber attack, the FAA said.
The FAA said following the incident that it would work to further pinpoint the cause of the problem and to prevent future disruptions.
NOTAMs are used to distribute essential information to flight operations personnel concerning abnormal statuses of the National Airspace System, according to the FAA website.
