say that faa system issues began to surface yesterday around 3:30 in the afternoon. the faa switched to a backup system then returned to the main system just before midnight. at 4:45 a.m., the faa rebooted the system but it took time for the critical data to reload. nbc news now learned today s problems were caused by a corrupted file. i ve been a pilot over 53 years and i have never that i can remember heard of the notam system being down. it s the first. reporter: it was last week that air traffic in florida ground to a halt after a different faa computer glitch. over the holidays, southwest airlines suffered major meltdown affecting a million passengers. now the u.s. travel industry says the country s aviation infrastructure is in immediate need of an upgrade. the air travel system in the united states is running a far less optimal way than it needs to. we know that.
that we need to make our systems, our technology as reliable and redundant and resilient as we can. but in the end. it is human beings who can really be resilient and solve problems that they have never seen before. so we will work very hard to recover from this. but i say that these systems need to be reliable, i mean that they don t fail often. when i mean that they are redundant, there are backups that can be applied immediately. they are resilient, they can recover quickly. more operation. and those qualities were obviously not affective in this case. it is also important that we not have single points of failure. in any of our systems. or common points of failure that seems to have happened in this case. the primary system and the backup system, both apparently, had the same corrupted file. it did not work that way. how old is this technology? clearly it sounds like at the very least that it needs to be
systems, substations and the like for vulnerabilities for different reasons again. but overall are there real concerns about how to make it safer? they don t even have a head of the federal aviation administration right now since last march. the nominee, philip washington, has been criticized for limited experience and also for a corruption scandal of some kind. there s an investigation that he is named not personally but involved in some way. there s no head. right. and airlines and the head of the faa, they don t take technology seriously, in the sense that the entire foundation of the safety system for aviation is on keeping your technology system modern, modernized, up to date, and to make sure you don t have glitches like this, or if you have a glitch in the backup system that it s identified early. you can understand one glitch. i can t understanding the two aren t identified. so we have to take when we talk about building critical infrastructure, let s stop talking about b
in the fwas of the notam system. curiously there was a corrupted file in the backup system. so the question is what kind of system are we talking about? how old is this system? how well maintained is it? is it capable of keeping up with the incredible demands we put wait, does corrupt file mean something nefarious or is it a benign glitch? it could really go either way. i m glad that the administration is couching their references to cyber crimes that we have no indication at this time of a cyberattack. i think it s a little early to be drawing the conclusion that there was no cyber connection to this. but as we know, the best cyberattackers are those who leave no trace and whose attribution is something that you build to over time, so we re going to need to watch this as it develops. it s the second aviation-related crisis in as many weeks and obviously there are different reasons for them happening, but at the end of the day many people are wondering about the infrastructure