Here’s What the FAA Has Been Focused on Instead of Keeping Planes in The Air

Keeping planes in the air has taken a back seat at the Federal Aviation Administration as the agency pivots its focus to diversity, equity, and inclusion under the leadership of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The FAA’s mission-critical pilot safety alerting system crashed overnight, causing the agency to temporarily ground all outgoing air traffic across the country Wednesday morning and delay more than 6,500 flights. The FAA has had much to say about the system under Buttigieg’s watch, but not for matters relating to its functionality or upkeep. Rather, the agency announced in December 2021 that it had changed the system’s name from “Notice to Airmen” to “Notice to Air Mission,” a “more applicable term” that the agency said is “inclusive of all aviators and missions.”

“The language we use in aerospace matters,” the FAA tweeted from its official account. “We’ve begun to adopt gender-neutral and inclusive aviation terminology as part of our agency-wide initiative.”

It’s not clear why the system failed overnight, but the White House said there was no evidence of a cyberattack. Buttigieg said Wednesday he didn’t know how the system crashed and ordered a root cause analysis to determine the cause of the failure. “Glitches or complications happen all the time,” Buttigieg said on MSNBC. – READ MORE