Canada Works Around Coincidental NOTAM Outage

Gemini Sparkle

Key Takeaways:

  • Canada's NOTAM system, operated by Nav Canada, experienced an outage for several hours on Wednesday.
  • Despite the system failure, Nav Canada implemented workarounds and "mitigations" to ensure no flight delays occurred within Canada.
  • Nav Canada believes its outage was coincidental and not related to the simultaneous, major FAA NOTAM system failure in the U.S.
  • Flights from Canada destined for the U.S. were still affected by the American FAA outage.
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Canada lost its NOTAM system for a few hours on Wednesday, but there were no flight delays. As a ground stop initiated by the failure of the FAA NOTAM system delayed or canceled thousands of flights, the Canadian system, operated by Nav Canada, employed some sort of workaround to keep flights operating. “NAV CANADA’s Canadian NOTAM entry system experienced an outage affecting newly issued NOTAMs at approximately 10:20 a.m. ET and was restored approximately at 1:15 p.m.,” Nav Canada spokeswoman Vanessa Adams told Global News. “Mitigations were in place to support continued operations.”

Adams told the network that the outage was a coincidence. “We are still investigating the root cause of the failure,” she said in an email statement. “At this time, we do not believe the cause is related to the FAA outage experienced earlier today.” Flights from Canada to the U.S. were among those stopped by the difficulties in the U.S.

Russ Niles

Russ Niles is Editor-in-Chief of AVweb. He has been a pilot for 30 years and joined AVweb 22 years ago. He and his wife Marni live in southern British Columbia where they also operate a small winery.
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