Presque Isle International Airport Impacted By Nationwide FAA Outage

PRESQUE ISLE, Maine (WAGM) -All Traffic was stopped at Presque Isle International Airport for nearly 12 hours after a nationwide system outage at the FAA that grounded flights from coast to coast this morning. Newssource 8′s Corey Bouchard spoke to the Presque Isle Airport Manager to learn more about how it impacted the County.

The FAA System Outage is affecting all airports across the country including here at Presque Isle Airport where this flight behind me was scheduled to take off at 6:11 am. at nearly 11:00 am, it’s still on the ground

Scott Wardwell - This is not, this was not a presque Isle issue, nor a newark issue, it was a national issue with a piece of the FAA’s computer system.

The System experiencing the outage was called NOTAM, it stands for the Notice To Air Mission System.

Scott - And basically what that system does is, say for example at an airport in montana, they have to close their runway, they issue that information into that NOTAM so that it’s available to any flight crew, really any passenger that this runway is closed”

Wardwell adds that it is madatory that air crews check the NOTAM bullitens before they are allowed to take off in an aircraft, and without it working, the FAA had to make the rare decision to issue a ground stop to all aircraft nationwide

Scott” and quite frankly, that decision is not very common, the last time that decision was made to do that was September 11th, 2001 and it’s my undestanding that prior to that decision being made on September 11th, 2001, it had never been made before”

Presque Isle International Airport see’s 4 flights each day, 2 departures and 2 arrivals, while it is likely there will be no issues with any future flights due to the NOTAM issue, if you are on a future flight, Wardwell says to monitor the latest status of your flight

Scott” now if you happen to be on one of those flights, I would recommend that you download the united app on your smartphone and you continue to check that app about the staus of your individual flight”

The flight that was scheduled to take off around 6:00am finally got into the air shortly after noon, nearly 6 hours later, Corey Bouchard, NS8.