WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A group of more than 120 U.S. lawmakers told the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) its computer outage Wednesday that disrupted 11,000 flights is “completely unacceptable” and demanded the agency explain how it will avoid future incidents.
House Transportation Committee Chair Sam Graves and the top Democrat on the panel Rick Larsen said in a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg the panel intends to “conduct vigorous oversight of the Department of Transportation’s plan to prevent these disruptions from occurring again.”
Lawmakers want details of what went wrong with a pilot messaging database that led to the first nationwide grounding of departing flights since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. They want Buttigieg to provide an “estimated cost to commercial airlines and passengers due to the delays resulting from the outage.”
(Reporting by David Shepardson; editing by Diane Craft)