Canada suffers same mysterious air system outage as US, delaying more flights

System restored and root cause of brief outage being investigated

Canada’s air traffic system suffered a similar outage to the one that occurred in the US for a brief period on Wednesday.

US air travel was badly disrupted by the failure of the Federal Aviation Administration’s  Notice to Air Missions system (NOTAM) overnight on Tuesday, forcing a full ground stop of domestic aviation on Wednesday morning.

Nav Canada, the Canadian national air navigation service provider, released a statement just after 12.30pm as US airlines struggled to resume normal service.

“Nav Canada’s Canadian NOTAM entry system is currently experiencing an outage affecting newly issued NOTAMs, and we are working to restore function.”

“We are not currently experiencing any delays related to this outage. We are assessing impacts to our operations and will provide updates as soon as they are available.”

At approximately 2.30pm Nav Canada released a further statement saying that the NOTAM system has been restored.

A tweet posted by the agency stated: “Nav Canada continues to investigate the cause of the outage; at this time, we do not believe it to be related to the FAA outage experienced earlier today.”

Contacted by The Independent, Nav Canada spokesperson Vanessa Adams said: “Nav Canada’s Canadian NOTAM entry system experienced an outage affecting newly issued NOTAMs at approximately 10.20am ET and was restored approximately at 1.15pm.”

She added: “Mitigations were in place to support continued operations. We are still investigating the root cause of the failure. At this time, we do not believe the cause is related to the FAA outage experienced earlier today.”

Flights from Canada were partially impacted by the US outage, which lasted until approximately 9am when operations were allowed to resume.

Many incoming flights were asked to hold at their departure airports to help ease pressure at US destinations and this likely impacted a number of flights from Canada.

At 2.30pm Toronto Pearson Airport recorded 22 per cent of its flights delayed, with similar disruption reported at Montreal.

More than a quarter of Air Canada’s flights were listed as delayed (118 individual flights) and two percent had been cancelled, according to data from FlightAware.

Air Canada warned passengers of possible disruption earlier in the day, telling people to check their status of flights following the FAA outage in the US.

Other Canadian airlines including WestJet and Porter had more modest delays of 16 per cent and seven per cent respectively, but have fewer routes into the US.