I would have said ‘cooling his jets’.
Damn, what a missed opportunity 
Much better phrasing!
I flew United with my family just yesterday and things couldn’t have been smoother. What a difference a day makes!
Another possible suspect?: Aurora (aircraft) - Wikipedia
The current issue of Time magazine has an interesting article on the USAF’s new B-21 Raider stealth bomber, BTW.
And see: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/british-airways-new-uniforms/index.html
Saw a great meme pic this morning. You’ll have to imagine the logos/ “artwork”, I’m not going to be able to link to the source:
Southwest Airlines: We’re gonna mess up thousands of flights! It’ll be epic!
FAA: Here, hold my beer. Y’all watch this!
I’m airborne riding home as I type. We left on a different flight than planned just 5 hours later than planned. A pal who’s supposed to start his 4 days in the barrel this evening is expecting normal ops based on his reading of the flow of jets and people directly affecting him. So it looks like a decent recovery at least in spots. We shall see.
Flew to SFO today. Flight was delayed due to the FAA thing and it was bumpy.
Have a question : Are pilots families and loved ones ever allowed access to black box recordings ?
As to US practice:
If by black box recoding you mean the on-board audio recording of a fatal crash, the official answer is “No, never”. The official transcript of that recording is a matter of public record in the final NTSB report. But the raw audio is not released.
There are persistent rumors of leaks to the surviving family in at least some accidents. But I’ve never seen anything substantiating such a rumor. Doubtless these sorts of leaks / unauthorized releases get easier as everything becomes just a data file that’s easy to copy or email.
Thank you
Really, the FAA grounded everything because they effed up NOTAMS. That’s their plan-B? Ground the planes.
Aren’t the Notices pretty much local? Why ground a MIA - JFK flight just because SKX/Taos just achieved Mystical Convergence and isn’t there anymore?
Weird: Canada’s NOTAM system failed briefly today as well. Officials are claiming that the Canadian issue was not related to the American one. Really? Two NOTAM systems go down within an hour or two of each other, and we’re supposed to believe they are completely unrelated events?
Can anyone remember a NOTAM system going down and grounding all flights before? I can’t.
They start the article by downplaying it, saying it was only a ‘brief’ interruption. Later in the article you find out that the system was offline for almost three hours.
Yes, they’re local, and mostly if not entirely covered by ATIS and if they’re not they CAN be by the time it take to read it. ATIS is an hourly or better broadcast that approaching/departing pilots have to listen to.
That we don’t have a backup to a backup system for this is beyond mind boggling.
NOTAMs are both local and regional. Some are about equipment or facility outages at airport XYZ and are of no interest except to flights going to XYZ or potentially diverting to XYZ. Others affect enroute operations, where GPS may be jammed or VORs and associated airways may be out of service, or where altitudes along airways may need to be amended. Those are of interest to every flight operating along the affected route(s). Others are about large areas, such as entire ATC centers (ARTCCs) affecting everybody in a multi-state area.
As a concrete example … Right now with the system back in business there are 26 NOTAMs for JFK and 44 for O’Hare. New York Center has 24, Cleveland Center has 17 and Chicago Center has 18. So a flight between ORD & JFK in either direction will be affected by 129 NOTAMs. Plus some more that are hard for me to pull up individually & count but would appear on our paperwork for such flight. That’s completely typical.
A typical NOTAM report for us flying between two major airline destinations runs to about 7 printed pages. There is a LOT of minutiae in there. And the occasional make-or-break nugget. When the FAA system failed, we could not obtain any of that data. The regulations require we have all of it freshly refreshed or we can’t go. Since nobody could obtain any of the required data, nobody could go. Simple & straightforward, if frustrating as hell.
Aviation Week had an interesting comment on the FAA’s NOTAM screwup.
The US industry operates ~22,000 flights and ~2.9 million seats per day domestically. It’s a big show and when shit goes wrong, it goes wrong at big scale.
All that information is available or can be made available with ATIS. The centers can disseminate what you need to know as you move through their airspace including TFR’s. If Satellites are down then guess what, you fly the old airways instead of direct.
They didn’t just shut down thousands of fights they buggered up crew duty times going into Thursday.
At some point you have to have a plan B. This did not happen. What if it went on for 2 days?
ATIS isn’t good enough when you need the info for the destination to plan your fuel load for departure. As well, the destination ATIS gets its NOTAM info from the central system too. The one that was down.
We did end up on a backup system after just a couple hours. Normal ops from the normal system wasn’t back for some time later. But it did take emergency authorization from the FAA to each carrier to use the backup system.
Remember everything must be perfect; legally there’s no room for guesswork or “close enough good enough”. And suddenly multiple tens of thousands of dispatchers & pilots are supposed to be using a system they’ve never trained on and do so with zero defects? That’s a tough call.
Yes but when you plan your fuel load you go with what you know.
Every flight you take is based on good enough. It’s nice to have minutia that trims fuel costs but at the end of the day it’s a system designed to operate without GPS.
Semi-humorous digression. Simultaneously with that, we had an even more critical outage here in Ontario today (and still ongoing): the website as well as the mobile app for the entire network of Ontario liquor stores was down and remains down. 
The reason given: a “cybersecurity incident”. Meaning they were hacked.
@LSLGuy: your insider reports of goings-on in the aviation world are fascinating. Much appreciated by this aviation fan. Thank you. 
ETA: @Magiver 2 posts up …
GPS isn’t the point. Whether or not we need alternates & the fuel to get there depends on which runways and approaches are available. We need the NOTAMS to know that.
The very short answer is the FARs require we have all the data. Don’t have all the data? Then it’s a violation to go. The industry is far more concerned with being legal than with getting the job done by working around the regs.
Private pilots are also bound to have all the data or not go. But they don’t have the same degree of FAA oversight and many don’t bother day in and day out because there’s no police force breathing down their neck. My world is not that way. I have a Fed on board looking over my shoulder every minute of every flight. So does my dispatcher & my great grand-boss. Nothing is left to “close enough” where regulations are involved. Nothing.
We can certainly debate whether this is stupid or past the point of diminishing returns and past the point of common sense. But that’s a sterile debate. Neither your, my, nor my grand-boss’es opinions matter spit to the Feds. Their Word is Law and that’s the end of it.
Maybe we’re talking past each other. Yes, their word is law. But this was a decision made by the FAA. It wasn’t a given. At some point they needed to deal with it.
It was a given based on the actual law as written. It’s not like the FAA suddenly decided that we can’t fly because we don’t have NOTAMs, it’s always been like that. They could possibly have given an immediate dispensation but that would’ve been a huge call to make and would’ve bitten them firmly on the backside if something had gone wrong due to a lack of NOTAM availability. The majority of NOTAMs are just boilerplate that isn’t of any great consequence*, but some of them are very important, and you need to know it when you’re flight planning, not when you’re halfway to your destination. Tacking 20 NOTAMs on to the ATIS isn’t a good way to handle it either, that would mean every time the ACARS prints out an updated ATIS it’s going to be include pages and pages of NOTAMs.
Even if it was allowed to fly without NOTAMs, I think most airline pilots would be uncomfortable flying without at least seeing the NOTAMs, unless it was a milk run between two airports they’re very familiar with and have flown to in the last day or so.
*Though most of them are important to someone.