If you are heading to the airport this afternoon, then you may be in for a nasty surprise. The FAA’s “NADIN” system based out of Atlanta, is experiencing an outage. This system (National Aerospace Data Interchange Network) is the big computer responsible for processing flight plans from every flight in US aerospace. Delays are increasing all across the FAA map.
At the moment, Chicago Midway is seeing delays up to 90 minutes, O’Hare is almost at 75 minutes, and most other East Coast airports are all at 60 minutes or more.
As the delays increase, the systems outage will have a severe knock on effect for the entire country, and things are bound to get worse.
This is not the first time the FAA has had an outage in its NADIN system, last year the system grounded flights across the country for close to 6 hours, and the FAA has not been able to trace the cause of the problem. The NADIN computers were designed back in the early 80’s, and are slated for replacement later this year. Of course, none of that will be of any help if you are sitting in a departure lounge reading this.
As with all delays, I suggest heading to the airport on time as well as contacting your airline. Chances are that your plane might still leave the gate on time, but you may end up being held in a holding pattern on the tarmac for several hours while controllers manually process flights. Be sure to pack something to read!