The U.S. Senate has given unanimous approval to a bill co-sponsored by Kansas Senator Jerry Moran to improve the safety of the FAA system and prevent future outages.

Moran, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, and West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito introduced the bipartisan bill.  The NOTAM Improvement Act would require the Federal Aviation Administration to strengthen the resiliency and cybersecurity of the NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system, which alerts pilots of safety and location hazards on flight routes.   The bill is a response to a NOTAM system outage in January that grounded flights across the country.

Moran stated in a press release that the FAA has a responsibility to make sure air travel in the U.S. is as safe and efficient as possible.  He said the January outage stranded millions of Americans and it was a warning of the need to strengthen and modernize the air travel system.   He is urging the House to approve the bill, which would create a task force to look at needed improvements.  The task force would be made up of representatives of air carriers, airports and airline pilots, along with aircraft dispatchers and FAA personnel unions and aviation safety and cybersecurity experts.