am taking the train. kaitlan, thank you very much. we appreciate it. cnn newsroom starts right now, of course, with the breaking news as well. good wednesday morning to you, i m jim sciutto. and i m erica hill. we are following the breaking news this morning after u.s. flights were grounded, the faa now lifting that ground stop. u.s. flights resuming here. there is, though, as you can imagine a huge mess unfolding at airports across this country and, frankly, around the world. a key faa safety system went down earlier this morning, that led to some scrambling from coast to coast. here is where we stand at this hour, the faa says it is set to resume more flight departures this hour, but in terms of the backlog, the damage that we re seeing, the delays and cancellations, understandably rising by the minute. new york lines are growing, atlanta and chicago delay warnings taking over departure screens. they may be the lucky ones stuck in the airports that are already i
inspections will be completed within the next few days. problems have plagued previous models of that plane. cnn safety analyst david sucy spoke eaearlier with our michae holmes. because this is a maintenance door, i d d be looking to see i that maintenancece door had bee removed for maintenance prior to this flight and if it had been reinstalled. in the pictures you can see the mounting brackets for that door and i don t see any evidence of those being torn off which would indicate to me that it s possible that the fastening structure wasn t done wasn t installed properly. so that s something that i d be looking at first thing. yeah, and, in fact, looking at that now, we ve got it up full on the screen there, it s a much bigger area. this isn t like a passenger window, this is a big area here. yeah, it is, and there are windows in that door, at least in some models, i d have to look at this one specifically. but that so it would look like it s a window, but when it came off
even your connecting flights are all going to be not departing or not starting to move until that time. this is a nationwide issue, it s not just a local issue. and, again, we will offer some snacks up front here. help yourself. reporter: so that s in state college, pennsylvania. but here in newark things are beginning to get back to normal. this was one of the first airports right here at nuke and atlanta hartsfield-jackson the first airports to get flights going again because of the backlog that was present. we will definitely see more delays here, but in terms of people being able to check in and hopefully by the end of the day get to their destination that has now resumed here at newark. keep your fingers crossed. appreciate it. thank you both. of course, the issue when the flights don t come in then they can t go out which can add to this chain reaction. cnn aviation safety analyst, former safety inspector david
relies on the notam system, always have, in my 30, 40 years in aviation i have never known this system to go down. so i think this is a significant problem right now. so to that point, david, what vulnerabilities in this system could this expose? and, again, we re early, they haven t figured out what brought it down, but the idea that a system like this could bring basically the whole air transportation system down and very quickly, listen, that s worri worrisome. it s very worrisome and even more so worrisome to me is i just went on to check my notams because we use these for pilots up and down the row, even drone pilots use this notam system to see what s going on in any particular operational area. here is what bothers me, the faa says, it s okay, go ahead and fly, however, when i go to the notam search and look at it right now it says due to system processing delays recently entered notams may not be
centralized database for anything that s abnormal they can also do their own checks, they can reach out to the airports, look at the individual airports to see what s going on at the receiving airport or any alternate airports that they might have selected and they can also do some end route information as well, but it s very time consuming. once they do that the big shift here is the fact that the pilots themselves and the dispatcher are taking on that responsibility to make sure that there s no abnormal situations. so the chances are that with your mom and i m 100% certain of this that the pilots would not have taken off if they weren t sure that it was safe to do so. listen, i m glad your mom is safe, that s important and it s good for folks who may be flying now who might be saying, wait a second, should i believe taking off right now in light of this. right. david, there is a lot of talk with a lot of these systems, legacy systems, that do air traffic control, et cetera, som