Jun. 6—WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber's bill aimed at finding ways to improve an aging aviation safety system was signed into law Saturday by President Joe Biden.
The bill, championed by the Republican congressman from Hermantown in the House and later by U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D- Minn., in the Senate, requires the Federal Aviation Administration to create a task force to develop recommendations on modernizing its U.S. Notices to Air Missions, or NOTAM, system.
NOTAM is designed to provide pilots with information they might encounter on their flight, like runway closures, construction and bird-strike risks. Earlier this year, the NOTAM system crashed when a contractor accidentally deleted critical files in the system's databases. The accident grounded flights nationwide for several hours.
"I am pleased that the NOTAM Improvement Act has been signed into law by the president," Stauber said. "This bill is critical to improving the safety of our skies for pilots and passengers by bringing experts from across the air travel industry together to improve the NOTAM system. We must avoid another system crash like the one in January that grounded all domestic air traffic for the first time since 9/11, and this bill is a crucial first step."
Stauber had tried several times to advance the bill. It passed the House in the last two congresses but was never taken up by the Senate.
But in light of the system's January outage, it gained new momentum. It easily passed the House in a 424-4 vote in late January, and Klobuchar introduced a companion bill in the Senate. The Senate passed the bill through unanimous consent in May.
"By upgrading and modernizing the FAA's NOTAM system, this new law will improve aviation safety and prevent system outages from derailing travel," Klobuchar said in a news release. "Travelers in the United States deserve safe and dependable air travel service, not nationwide ground stops caused by system failures like we saw earlier this year."
The task force will include representatives from air carriers, labor unions, and the general and business aviation industries. It will also include experts in aviation, human factors, computer system architecture and cybersecurity.
The task force would have a year to review the current NOTAM system and recommend how to better organize and display information to the pilots while ensuring "the stability, resiliency, and cybersecurity of the NOTAM computer system,"
the bill's text said.
In
a news release Saturday
announcing the bill signing, the White House thanked Stauber and Klobuchar for their leadership.
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