As DOGE enters FAA, an aging aviation safety system may come into focus

As attention mounts on the Federal Aviation Administration following a handful of fatal airplane crashes this year and reports that Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to review the country’s air traffic systems, documents obtained by FedScoop reveal the complicated nature of modernizing a platform for pilots to understand the potential hazards and conditions they might encounter on their flights. 

The much-criticized Notice to Airmen system could see increased scrutiny after it suffered an outage just two weeks ago. NOTAM was saved by a backup system — which FedScoop reported on back in July — and a patch that hearkened back to early in 2023, when a damaged file uploaded to the system inadvertently forced the FAA to shut down flights across the country. The event marked one of the most significant pauses to American aviation since the September 11 terrorist attacks. 

The documents obtained by FedScoop reference a 2023 order to Concept Solutions, an aerospace and military technology developer, for modernization support for the federal NOTAM system. A statement of work, first written in October 2022 and then updated in April 2023 and again in September 2023, highlighted the FAA’s hope to transition from the United States NOTAM System (USNS) to the newer, modernized Federal NOTAM System (FNS). A primary software release had a due date of March 7 of this year. The FAA did not answer a series of questions about the contract, including the status of decommissioning the USNS and the status of physical hardware used to support the system. 

Gary Church, a former FAA air traffic control specialist and longtime aviation management executive, said the contract represents an effort to “have multiple distribution points.” 

“They’re trying to do a distributed system via an internet concept or the internet cloud,” Church said. “This contract … is an effort to integrate everything into one virtual system. In other words, using the cloud today to provide this information to whoever needs it, whenever they need it.” 

Transitioning NOTAM to a virtual environment

The work detailed in the contract focuses on federal NOTAM modernization support, including maintenance, data migration, and enhancements. But the documents, and updates to them, also highlight concerns about maintaining continuous use of the system.

A major challenge is ensuring that improvements to one aspect of the NOTAM don’t inadvertently disrupt other parts of the system, which aviation throughout the U.S. currently depends on. One air safety review from the FAA pointed out that sometimes a single outage can only be fixed by shutting down the whole system. 

The contract states that Concept Solutions is supposed to help the FAA transition the FNS from the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center — a regional FAA office where it’s currently stored on hardware — to a virtual environment. The work “includes a subset of NOTAM modernization enhancements to implement digital airspace NOTAMs,” per the contract, which notes that the company’s “understanding of the interconnectedness of these programs of work will be critical to their success.”

If the transition to a virtual system fails, the system is supposed to be designed to fallback to the physical support location at the aeronautical center, the document notes. 

A version of the statement of work dated September 2023 appears to have been updated to address potential vulnerabilities in the NOTAM system. Specifically, the later version of the document states that the contractor must take a “holistic view” of the NOTAM environment and “not perform architectural design decisions on a particular component in isolation of all other components comprising the NOTAM system.” The note also encourages the contract to consider “system fallback states.” 

Another update to the statement of work notes that “the contractor must ensure the integration of the FNS Transition to IESP and the USNS to FNS Migration result in a stablilized (sic) NOTAM system when deployed into production and that issues deemed critical by the Aeronautical Services program office in the current operational baseline are addressed as part of the FNS baseline.” 

Shawn Pruchnicki, a former pilot and NASA research engineer who teaches at Ohio State’s Center for Aviation Studies, said that cloud-based sources of information aren’t a guarantee of a stabilized system. 

“Everyone will say, ‘well, there’s backups in place,’” he said. “But we’ve also seen time and time again where those things have been said and things have gone horribly wrong.”

Concept Solutions, the company that is listed on the NOTAM modernization contract, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment by FedScoop over the past few months. 

Rick Castaldo, a retired Department of Transportation engineer and program manager at FAA, said in an email to FedScoop that the current NOTAM system “is a patchwork of archaic software languages hosted on different ancient platforms that are not supportable with current operating systems or computer hardware. The NOTAM modernization attempted today is based on cobbling together short term solutions to address recent computer and software crashes.”

The FAA would not specifically comment on the statements of work or the changes to them, pointing only to previous answers to FedScoop questions in July 2023. At that time, the aviation agency had put out a solicitation for more information from private industry on how they might improve the NOTAM system. Twenty-two companies responded to that request for information. At the time, the agency said it was still considering its options for “future operational management of the NOTAM system.” 

When FedScoop asked the FAA for information about which private companies were involved in the legacy NOTAM system or the new system and what those companies might be doing, the FAA told FedScoop to file a public records request. 

“The current NOTAM format is a legacy, text based, non-standardized format that is difficult for both humans and machines to read and interpret,” an FAA spokesperson said. “Digital NOTAMs capture the underlying data elements of a NOTAM in a data model that allows for the information to be standardized and transformed into different views (such as plain language or a geospatial representation that can be overlaid with a map) which supports improved interpretation of the data — by humans and machines.” 

Legacy issues abound with NOTAM

A 2024 Government Accountability Office report, triggered by the 2023 outage, notes that the existing NOTAM system is decades old. According to the GAO, some 1,300 flights were canceled and nearly 10,000 others were delayed due to the legacy system outage. 

There are myriad other problems with the NOTAM system, sources told FedScoop. 

“There are most likely no FAA employees today that could provide an ‘end-to end’

diagram of the entire NOTAM system with specific software and hardware configurations,” Castaldo said. “The FAA relies almost 100 percent on contractors that have been rotated due to changing vendors and competitions without regard to overall performance.”

One former pilot told FedScoop that the system can be overpopulated with notices, only some of which might be important for a pilot to understand before taking off. Still, there’s generally no automated way of sorting through these notices, which means they can be incredibly long and difficult to completely process before flights. 

The notices themselves are densely written and use terminology that is often not immediately discernible. An example provided by the FAA shows the notices’ unique format. 

Textual data can also limit the ability to modernize the NOTAM system, an FAA statement of objectives from 2023 noted.

Shem Malmquist, a working pilot who also teaches at Florida Tech’s College of Aeronautics, said the entire NOTAM system “migrated from color pipe machines,” which locked in “certain abbreviations and codes” beyond their point of usefulness. 

“It’s really great for computers, which is kind of funny because it was created before computers,” Malmquist added. “But it’s … not really very user friendly for the way humans think.”