The Federal Aviation Administration is now putting new safeguards in place to prevent another system failure.
The FAA said earlier this month that a
damaged database file appeared to have caused the
outage in the
safety-alert system that distributes notices to pilots and air
controllers. In the aftermath, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg
promised a thorough examination to avoid another major failure.
“Our
immediate focus is technical — understanding exactly how this happened,
why the redundancies and the backups that were build into the system
were not able to prevent the level of disruption that we saw,” said
Buttigieg.
In
a letter to Congress, the FAA says it now requires at least two people
to be present during maintenance of the system – one of them must be an
FAA manager.