Why are American flights grounded?

The suspension of American flights to China has caused some controversy; In fact, the cancellation of flights means that the already scarce flight capacity between China and the United States will be cut again.

It will not only affect the income of several domestic airlines, but also directly affect the return passengers and the fares of China and the United States. The scheduled cancellation of flights between China and the United States includes several flights of Air China, China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines and Xiamen Airlines, covering almost the whole of September. From this perspective, the consequences of domestic grounding are still many, and the fare has also increased.

Reasons for grounding in the United States:

The core of this failure is NOTAM(NOTAM, Notice to Air Missions) of FAA, which is used to inform the operators involved in the flight of key safety operation information, including runway closure, equipment interruption and other potential dangers in the route or in the position that may affect the flight.

This is the second large-scale interruption of domestic aviation in the United States in recent days. During the Christmas holiday in 2022, there was a problem with the crew scheduling system of Southwest Airlines, which caused the company to cancel thousands of flights in a few days. According to The New York Times 65438+February 28th, in the past week, Southwest Airlines has cancelled nearly 1 1000 flights, and thousands of passengers can only spend the night in the terminal.

Less than a month later, FAA's NOTAM broke down again, causing thousands of flights to be cancelled again. The Wall Street Journal said that this incident shows the fragility of the American air transportation system and its dependence on aging technology.

The first time node of this failure was Tuesday, at 3: 28 pm EST 3:28+ 10/October 10, and the FAA informed that the system had failed. The notice shows that "at present, technicians are working hard to restore the system, and there is no relevant assessment for restoring the service."