Kansas Senator Jerry Moran along with Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Representatives Pete Stauber (MN-08) and Mark DeSaulnier (CA-10) announced that their bipartisan legislation to help prevent Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system outages has passed the U.S. House and U.S. Senate and is headed to the President’s desk to be signed into law.
The NOTAM Improvement Act would require the FAA to establish a task force to strengthen the resiliency and cybersecurity of the NOTAM system, which alerts pilots of safety and location hazards on flight routes. This bill follows a recent NOTAM system outage in January that grounded flights nationwide.The task force would be composed of representatives from air carriers, airports, and airline pilot, aircraft dispatcher, and FAA personnel unions, as well as aviation safety and cybersecurity experts.In January, Sens. Moran and Klobuchar spoke with FAA Acting Administrator Billy Nolen following the NOTAM system failure to discuss his agency’s efforts to identify the factors behind the system outage that grounded all flights nationwide and prevent similar breakdowns from happening again. Moran is the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Aviation and co-chair of the Senate Travel and Tourism Caucus.
