Sea-Tac Airport officials said the Federal Aviation Administration system outage caused minimal impact Wednesday morning.
When travelers initially heard about the outage, they said it was the last thing they needed after all of the holiday chaos.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, it’s Southwest again!’” said Rephayah Black, who flew out of Sea-Tac. “Hopefully not, and it seems like the FAA is taking care of this.”
Travelers who were just learning about the situation when arriving at the airport rushed to check on their flights.
“As of right now my flight is on time, but you never know exactly what could happen,” said Mason Wisen, another traveler who flew out of Sea-Tac.
As the FAA worked to restore the Notice to Air Missions system — which sends out real-time flight hazards and restrictions to all commercial airline pilots — the administration ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 6 a.m.
“I started checking my flight, I immediately looked on FlightAware to make sure my flight was on time,” said Black.
Just before 6 a.m., U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg confirmed the system was fully restored.
“As the committee prepares for FAA reauthorization legislation, we will be looking into what caused this outage and how redundancy plays a role in preventing future outages,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said.
“I mean, it’s scary, honestly,” said Wisen. “If you think about it, like there’s people flying every day, there’s people that need to get to places and if there’s like a big-time malfunction like that, that can impact all of us directly and can cause a lot of unforeseen challenges to people traveling.”
Sea-Tac Airport officials say the outage did not have a major impact at the airport. By 7 a.m., FlightAware was showing only 68 flights at Sea-Tac had been delayed.
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