Biden orders Transportation Sec. Buttigieg to conduct FULL probe into nationwide flight grounding

President Joe Biden is calling on Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to launch a full investigation into what forced flights across the United States to be grounded or delayed on Wednesday morning.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has asked all airlines to temporarily hold domestic flights on the ground until 9 a.m. ET  as officials frantically search for what caused the outage.  

Biden told reporters early on Wednesday that he’s already been in contact with Buttigieg and indicated he would be keeping a close eye on the developing matter.

‘I told them to report directly to me when they find out,’ the president said shortly before 8 a.m. ET.

‘Aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now. They don’t know what the cause of it is, they expect in a couple of hours they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time.’

President Joe Biden told reporters early on Wednesday that he’s already been in contact with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

Buttigieg released his own statement an hour earlier announcing that he was working with FAA officials to investigate.

‘I have been in touch with FAA this morning about an outage affecting a key system for providing safety information to pilots,’ the Transportation Secretary said.

‘FAA is working to resolve this issue swiftly and safely so that air traffic can resume normal operations, and will continue to provide updates.’

All flights currently in the sky are safe to land, according to the FAA.

The body announced at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday that its Notice to Air Missions system was not operating properly.

It ‘alerts pilots about closed runways, equipment outages, and other potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight,’ according to the FAA.

As of now, its National Airspace System operations remain ‘limited’ with the Notice to Air Missions system still not fully restored.

There’s currently no evidence that a cyberattack caused the outage, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

However she said Biden ordered the Transportation Department to launch a ‘full investigation into the causes.’

The new air travel crisis comes hot on the heels of Southwest Airlines’ holiday season meltdown, which led to roughly 16,000 of the company’s flights being cancelled between December 21 and December 31.

Scenes of long airport lines and stranded passengers sleeping on chairs or canceling plans to see family altogether gave a grim undertone to the first holiday season largely without COVID-19 restrictions since 2019.