Carol Frederick wasn’t taking any chances Wednesday morning at O’Hare Airport.
The 64-year-old Villa Park woman decided not to check her bags after her flight was delayed, remembering the pileup of suitcases during the recent chaos with Southwest Airlines.
“I don’t want to have to go home and not have my suitcase,” said Frederick, concerned her flight might end up being canceled.
As of 9 a.m., her American Airlines flight to Phoenix was about two hours late. She was on her way to meet her new grandson, she said.
“It is what it is. I hope I get out,” she said.
Thousands of flights across the U.S. were canceled or delayed Wednesday after a government system that offers safety and other information to pilots broke down, stranding some planes on the ground for hours.
The White House said there was no evidence that a cyberattack triggered the outage, which upended travel plans for millions of passengers. President Joe Biden said he directed the Department of Transportation to investigate.
Brothers Matthew and Brandon Sharpe had just arrived at O’Hare from Michigan to take an emergency trip to Oklahoma to visit a dying sibling. They learned while waiting for a delayed flight that their brother had died.
Even if the flight had been on time, they said, they probably wouldn’t have arrived in time to say goodbye to their brother, Byron Delaney.
“Still frustrating nevertheless. My niece [Delaney’s daughter] is still waiting at the terminal,” Matthew Sharpe said.
In the end, the brothers decided not to fly to Oklahoma on Wednesday despite having bought tickets.
“We decided not to go, just in case we have to go back for a funeral,” Matthew Sharpe said.
Monica Birnbaum, 65, of Northbrook, was on her way to Zurich, Switzerland, with a layover in Newark, New Jersey, to see her daughter perform with Team USA’s synchronized skating team.
Her flight was supposed to leave at 10 a.m. but was delayed about two hours due to the ground stop, she said.
“I’m just hoping that everything goes smoothly, because I’d like to get to Switzerland,” she said.
At 12:50 p.m., she was still at O’Hare but just about ready to board her plane.
“Very annoying, and I’m really hoping we make our connection,” she said from the departure gate.
The ground stop led to a flight cancellation for Megan Kuckkahn, her 10-year-old son and her boyfriend, Benjamin Disher, all from Wisconsin. They were headed to Jamaica for Kuckkhan’s sister’s wedding.
“We were supposed to already be on the plane, and here we are sitting at the airport,” said Kuckkahn. The trio managed to book another flight leaving Thursday from O’Hare. But others in their wedding party, including her parents, were having a hard time finding flights, she said.
Longtime aviation insiders could not recall an outage of such magnitude caused by a technology breakdown. Some compared it to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the terror attacks of September 2001.
“Periodically there have been local issues here or there, but this is pretty significant historically,” said Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines and now a consultant in Minneapolis.
Whatever the cause, the outage revealed how dependent the world’s largest economy is on air travel, and how dependent air travel is on an antiquated computer system called the Notice to Air Missions System, or NOTAM.
Before commencing a flight, pilots are required to consult NOTAMs, which list potential adverse impacts on flights, from runway construction to the potential for icing. The system used to be telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for the information, but has moved online.
The NOTAM system broke down late Tuesday, leading to more than 1,000 flight cancellations and more than 6,000 delayed flights by 11 a.m. Wednesday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.
Campbell said there has long been concern about the FAA’s technology, and not just the NOTAM system.
“So much of their systems are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable, but they are out of date,” he said.
John Cox, a former airline pilot and aviation safety expert, said there has been talk in the aviation industry for years about trying to modernize the NOTAM system, but he did not know the age of the servers that the FAA uses.
He couldn’t say whether a cyberattack was possible.
“I’ve been flying 53 years. I’ve never heard the system go down like this,” Cox said. “So something unusual happened.”
Contributing: AP
