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Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

nco.ncep.noaa.gov

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Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#141

Post by dylan604 »

mvgoogler wrote: post #112
daenney wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should not assume it's world wide. Given "the FAA is investigating" and there's no reports of other countries it's reasonable to assume that this is limited to the US, or at least northern continental America. (The title of the submission is also "Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage")

> The title of the submission is also "Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage" Yeah, but the title is made up. There is noting in the official report about this being "nationwide". The report only states that there is a metar outage consisting of 167 stations. It doesn't provide any context on which stations are missing or how they are distributed. Adding "nationwide" to the title is pure FUD IMO.

if the outages are on the east coast and a flight from the west coast is preparing to fly to one of the east coast airports that are affected, how is this not nationwide?

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#142

Post by bobkazamakis »

zackbloom wrote: post #12

Unlike the NOTAM outage, a METAR outage will and should actually affect flights. Without weather at your destination it becomes impossible to know if it’s safe to land there. The forecasts (TAF) are actually used more in flight planning, but actual weather is very valuable while enroute, when not close enough to hear weather over the radio from the destination airport.

>Unlike the NOTAM outage, a METAR outage will and should actually affect flights.

We have mines being blasted to our north in temporarily restricted military airspace - lets just allow pilots to roll the dice?

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#143

Post by Zaskoda »

ceejayoz wrote: post #127
Zaskoda wrote: post #117

Could it be the solar flare? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/01/16/th...

We get something like ten of these a year.

According to Tamitha Skov, right now is a particular intense solar storm: https://www.patreon.com/posts/77348743

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#144

Post by neilv »

trollied wrote: post #6

Has anything happened regarding IT staffing at the FAA recently? There was the NOTAM outage last week [1], and now this! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34337158

I don't know anything about these two incidents. But, FWIW, some of the past professional work I'm most proud of was on FAA contracts (on other systems). I'm sure they're handling the immediate situation, and -- consistent with their culture -- they'll analyze what went wrong and can be learned, and follow through on that.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#145

Post by drstewart »

ceejayoz wrote: post #58
SamPatt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a conversative. Presidents don't pass budgets. FAA funding has increased, not decreased. I can criticize my government all I want. You're turning this into a political party thing when it's a government service failure.

Presidents propose budgets (the CBO even uses the term "the President's budget"; https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58417 ), sign them into law, threaten Congress with vetos, and have significant influence over their party as a whole. Trump in particular was successful in drubbing opponents out of office; Liz Cheney went from #3 in House leadership to a pariah largely overnight.

This is all a lot of weasel words to avoid the fact that the President does not pass the budget, and their proposals bear little resemblance to what actually get passed.

Liz Cheney is completely irrelevant here.

Post FAA's ACTUAL BUDGET over the last 8 years and let us judge.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#146

Post by gojomo »

jaywalk wrote: post #66
flandish wrote: post #47

Just gotta ask: Southwest, NOTAM, and now this… Is some group pen-testing?

Southwest's meltdown was definitely not an attack. Their crew scheduling software was so outdated that it required people to call in and speak to a human to report when they were out of position due to a cancelled flight. The sheer volume of cancellations resulted in this very manual system simply falling over, and so when the weather cleared up they actually had no idea where most of their crews were.

Sure, that's the publicly-reported story. Is it sufficient? Hard to tell from the outside.

Just a tiny bit of blackmailer-sabotage or vandal mischief-making – the sort of thing often underreported for legitimate reasons! – could've been the margin between some mild embarassment & the total collapse we saw. (For example: tying up the call-in lines to turn a normal hold time of minutes into hours, or long busy signals.)

Simple monocausal stories are for unsophisticated spectators.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#147

Post by jjulius »

flandish wrote: post #100
mardifoufs wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird that americans always seem to have this sort of siege mentality. We already know the causes of the other outages, and they have nothing to do with the foreign interference boogeyman.

Why do you assume I am American? Or are you speaking generally? “We” don’t know the causes, only what was reported. I’ve worked on a lot of old systems needing to be updated, migrated, or sunset. For sure it’s 99% of the time due to management being lazy. I get that. And I know correlation/causation, but hey my orig comment was a simple curiosity. Sure, my nature distrusts what a corporation says because it’s always…

>Sure, my nature distrusts what a corporation says because it’s always filtered through stockholder functions

OK, but in Southwest's case, you had former and current employees from various positions within the company publicly coming out and lambasting Southwest for the failure to actually invest in upgrading their scheduling system that led to the outage. It wasn't just a corporation coming out and going, "Here's what we hope you believe happened," it was pissed off employees publicly fucked off that their years of complaints went unheard and now they were all paying the price for being ignored.

>Or is this truly an odd and rare timing?

It's just odd/rare. I would wager that your brain's rush to try and tie them together like this is just it's way of trying to make sense of something it normally doesn't see.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#148

Post by mardifoufs »

pookha wrote: post #103
mardifoufs wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird that americans always seem to have this sort of siege mentality. We already know the causes of the other outages, and they have nothing to do with the foreign interference boogeyman.

It's weird how Europeans have this fedual surf mentality.

I'm not european, and if anything, I'm looking into moving to the US soon. I'm not trying to do the usual "americans, amirite?" thing. It's just that there is much more of a "national security angle" to every discussion like this in the US. Which is pretty unique to america I thini

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#149

Post by jaywalk »

xxpor wrote: post #138
w10-1 wrote: post #136

The outage seems to be in receiving reports from weather stations (primarily airports). When arriving at an airport, a pilot is required to confirm they have the latest METAR information for the site. It's presumed negligence when pilots don't know the weather. This is because weather is the #1 environmental factor in accidents. But the actual use of weather in flying (esp. for commercial flights) is not via METAR bu…

Does in cockpit radar actually get you on the ground pressure?

No, of course not. But pilots aren't going to aviationweather.gov while they're flying, either. They get that info from the controller or ATIS.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#150

Post by mwint »

xxpor wrote: post #138
w10-1 wrote: post #136

The outage seems to be in receiving reports from weather stations (primarily airports). When arriving at an airport, a pilot is required to confirm they have the latest METAR information for the site. It's presumed negligence when pilots don't know the weather. This is because weather is the #1 environmental factor in accidents. But the actual use of weather in flying (esp. for commercial flights) is not via METAR bu…

Does in cockpit radar actually get you on the ground pressure?

No, those come from ground reporting stations which feed into a whole bunch of sources - online stuff will give it to you including Foreflight, or just key up the ATIS and listen for a few seconds. Or ask a controller.
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