By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. senators on Wednesday raised concerns about a string of recent near miss airplane incidents with the acting Federal Aviation Administration head as well as about a FAA computer system outage that snarled thousands of flights last month.
“These incidents are concerning. They impact Americans confidence in our aviation system,” said Senate Commerce chair Maria Cantwell at Wednesday’s hearing. “The FAA must have redundancies, and not a single point where a failure can happen in a key system.”
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating a series of serious close calls including a near collision last month between FedEx and Southwest Airlines planes in Austin and a runway incursion at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.
Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen said the agency was taking steps to prevent near misses and speed up systems modernization efforts but acknowledged some upgrades will take years to complete.
Senator Ted Cruz, the top Republican on the committee, said the near misses “were almost mass fatality crashes” that could have killed hundreds of people.
In addition to the close calls, senators wanted answers about a January situation in which the FAA halted all departing passenger airline flights for nearly two hours because of a computer outage in a pilot messaging database, the first nationwide ground stop of its kind since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Cruz asked if new FAA safeguards remove the risk of a similar single point of failure. “Is there redundancy built into it, or can a single screwup ground air traffic nationwide?”
On Tuesday, Nolen said he was launching a safety review after the recent near miss incidents raised questions about the U.S. aviation system.
The FAA will hold a safety summit in March.
The NTSB on Tuesday said it would investigate a Dec. 18 incident in which United Airlines Boeing 777 jet lost significant altitude before recovering shortly after departing Kahului, Hawaii.
The United States has not had a major fatal U.S. passenger airline crash since February 2009.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
