The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has outlined a multi-step plan aimed at ensuring it can return air traffic to near normal operations within 24h of a major outage, following a fire that affected the airspace around Chicago in September. "The FAA plans to immediately begin to revise its contingency strategy... to include the operational efficiency goal of achieving 90% of normal operations within 24hr of a major outage," says the FAA in a report released today. The report, which outlines a series of security, technology and operational improvements, is the product of a 30-day review the agency initiated following the September fire at an air traffic control centre in Aurora, Illionois. The fire, started by an FAA-contracted employee, shut down the centre, causing hundreds of flight cancellations. The airspace returned to normal on 13 October.
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