By Ankit Bhateja
11th January 2023 will be remembered as one of the most tragic days in world aviation history where all the flights in US airspace had to be grounded, affecting more than 5000 flights in a single day due to a glitch in the NOTAM system. Notice to Airmen/Air Missions (NOTAM) is a notification system for pilots which is used to provide information about airspace restrictions, temporary hazards, and other changes to aviation operations. NOTAMs are typically issued for a specific period of time and may be updated or cancelled at any time.
The problem areas
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the nodal agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation which regulates all aspects of civil aviation in the country. The FAA’s preliminary enquiry indicates that a damaged database file was the reason behind the outage but the possibility of a potential cyber-attack is still not out of the picture and a further enquiry has been initiated. Whatever comes out to be the reason for the outage, this incident has shown that the aviation communication infrastructure needs a serious second look.
Technologies like NOTAM are almost a century old and were inducted during the early days of commercial flights. NOTAM relies on Telegraphy which used to be the most efficient way of delivering brief textual information at that time, containing code and abbreviations, but in this modern era where air traffic has increased exponentially over the last few decades the number of NOTAMs issued has now crossed 2Mn every year worldwide. This bombardment of NOTAMs sometimes ends up taking 100s of pages of hard-to-read information and still continues to be the backbone of the communication system of this billion-dollar industry. This is not the first time that NOTAM has put lives in jeopardy, several other incidents in the past like AIR Canada 759, Comair etc also have proven that this technology needs drastic changes.
Risk and road ahead
NOTAM’s underlying technology might be able to protect the information through its encryption but its baseline infrastructure and lack of visual elements in the messages possess some real challenges.
In the era, where we see newer weapons that cause more damage without explosives this obsolete infrastructure could cause great damage if exploited. In a cyber incident that took place in November 2022, Boeing-owned subsidiary Jeppesen also faced disruptions impacting the reception, distribution and processing of NOTAMs impacting several flights. Incidents like these can end up providing critical information such as wait time, system backup time, response time etc to the enemy for the counter-attacks in the warfare scenarios leaving the airspace in chaos and the territory prone to attacks due to the lack of situational awareness for the aircraft. There have been some talks to evolve the NOTAMs into a digital service and to bring it under Universal System Wide Information Management (SWIM) but the progress and implementation seem to be happening at a snail’s pace.
It is to be noted that new satellite constellations are being launched, targeting areas like communication services and real-time situational awareness for critical sectors like aviation, where lack of globally available data used to be a big challenge. Such technologies can play a key role by enabling the aviation sector to take a giant leap in modernising its communication systems and by also acting as a strong redundant infrastructure backhaul for critical times because for every aircraft take-off is optional, but landing is mandatory!
India’s aviation sector
India’s cross-sectoral policy reforms and its growing economy are fuelling rapid transformation across the nation which is creating a transition of the citizens from the lower to the middle class. This shift will make India one of the busiest air travel markets by size and will require the country to take a step towards indigenization of the underlying technologies to make this sector more cost-efficient and reliable. We have already seen a drastic transition in the financial sector where India has now become a leader by creating new and out-of-the-box solutions which are now on the verge of becoming the underlying technologies for the global financial markets. A recent push in the maritime sector is another example that will act as a stepping stone in the same direction.
A similar push is required for the aviation sector as well which would help the new solutions to come out of this talent-rich country and will help to achieve the transition from the conventional to the new cost-effective and modern solutions for the aviation sector.
Ankit Bhateja is Founder & Director, Xovian Aerospace.
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