After the 90-minute stoppage of all air traffic in the USA on Wednesday, the airlines are expecting a return to normal operations.

Major US airlines such as Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines announced that they expected air traffic to return to normal on Thursday. According to flight tracker FlightAware, 11,300 flights in the USA had either been canceled or delayed the day before. In the hour and a half of the outage, all air traffic in the USA came to a standstill, the first time this had happened in 20 years.

According to initial findings by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the disruption was apparently caused by a faulty database file. There are no indications of a hacker attack, the FAA announced on Wednesday. However, investigations were still ongoing. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on CNN that after the failure of the Notam (Notice to Air Missions) system, which is important for flight preparation for pilots, the emergency system did come on. However, there were doubts as to whether it was working properly. A complete restart was therefore necessary, which prompted the FAA to halt all domestic flights for 90 minutes.

Pilots use Notam to find out about scheduled restrictions and short-term dangers on the route or changes to technical procedures at airports. For example, they can find out whether there are airspace closures following volcanic eruptions or due to military conflicts, as is currently the case in Europe due to the war in Ukraine.

(Report by David Shepardson, Rajesh Kumar Singh, written by Kerstin Dörr and Myria Mildenberger; Edited by Hans Busemann; If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets)