against the hard currency is, economic crises are still posing also a multiple challenge to the people to the civilians, regular iraqis, so marked the southern and his support of probably want to say that we're still strong. we can make a come back at any time. remember, this is after a long, inter, probably 4 months since the last took to the streets during the violence that the capital baghdad witnessed. namely in the green zone in august where and when dozens of so the supporters will killed as they clashed with security forces. so now as his rival, his rival parliamentary block manage it to push or to interstate. there are no many as prime minister them how much he asked with any the month is on after. so then he took off, his nothing has changed yet. according to these supporters affiliated to she had

neither us or the the all right, let's have a quick recap of the headlines analysis era, and russia says it has captured the eastern ukrainian ton of soda, russia, wagner group set on tuesday that it's mercenaries had, sees the salt mining town buck much, while keith had said that it remains in control of the town. how ship is moore from moscow? the russian defense ministry announced a few minutes ago that it is now in full control of a solid odd and with this will give russia the chance to and cj backlog completely. now, yesterday there were announcements from the wagner group diversity group that they are in full control of solid are they even is should some publish some videos for the fighters walking in the, in the city police in germany is spending

a 3rd day trying to evict, protest us from the village of literature, the climate activists are trying to stop the expansion of coal mine. they expect thousands of people will join them on saturday. research to say exxon mobil accurately predicted climate change decades ago, but downplayed its findings. according to a report in the general science, the oil giant projected a temperature increase of 0.2 degrees celsius every decade. not pretty much matches . the current measured rate of global warming. china has reported a record trade surplus of $877000000000.00 for 2022 despite security. various restrictions, however, exports for december, where the lowest level since the start of the pandemic. in february 2020, the weakness was due to sorry, inflation right around the world. a special council has been appointed to investigate us president joe biden's handling of sensitive government documents.

it's emerge that a 2nd set of papers was found at his delaware home in december. the 1st batch of files was uncovered at one of biden's form offices. that was 2 months ago, but was only made public on monday. the president says he didn't know he had the documents. right, right. state with all the news here on our desert. got inside story coming up and another half hour instrument i'd ah a i computed less grounds, thousands of planes across the united states. airlines flying into the country were delayed to disrupting international travel. so how did this happen and how

vulnerable are crucial items systems elsewhere? this is inside story. ah, hello and welcome to the program, am fully back table failure of a system that gives safety warnings to pilots. force the grounding of all departing planes in the u. s. for 90 minutes, on wednesday, thousands of flights were disrupted domestic and international with delays to pains heading for the us from elsewhere. so how could this happen and what lessons can be learned? or put that to, i guess, in just a moment. first al jazeera heidi's or cast or rewards from washington. it was a sight not seen since $911.00, thousands of planes grounded at all u. s. airports due to a nation wide stoppage called by the federal aviation administration. no,

nothing like this. so bona love and obviously, you know, everything just happened because of the system, right? they did, she just punch control alt delete the f a a says a computer failure was to blame. specifically the notice to air mission system or not m suffered a temporary outage. without it, like crews could not access the latest safety alerts about fly conditions and runways. we still consider this to be a vital safety system because this is the one that moves messages that a pilots need on anything from a taxi way or a runway being out to an issue with the navigation beacon to may be an upcoming military or space operation. as in a certain sector, the outage did not impact quite already in the air. the ground start lasted about an hour, 4 and a half until usa said the computer problem was fixed. the cause of the outage remains unclear. there is no direct indication of any kind of external or nefarious activity,

but we're not yet prepared to rule that out. president joe biden has ordered an investigation. the white house says there is no indication of a cyber attack. the f a is working aggressively to get to the bottom of the root causes for the system outage, so that it does not happen again. meanwhile, thousands of delayed are canceled flights, have colored flight status for the airports red. this is the domino effect of the ground stop and its impacting travelers already battered by a chaotic holiday travel season. try to wilford smith hopes his flight from washington to fort lauderdale. florida will take off on time. his wife is waiting there, he says, and he hasn't seen her in a long time. oh, my 1st thought was freaking out. like no, i haven't seen her in 5 months, and now it may be a day or 2 more that an apparent technical glitch can hold the u. s. air travel industry impacting millions has drawn renewed scrutiny to the systems

vulnerabilities. a full investigation has been protest. heidi joe castro al jazeera washington now just 2 weeks ago, a different critical control system broke down in florida causing delays. while failure of such technologies rare, it's not the 1st session student in recent years. a year ago this month, the f a, a briefly grounded flight in the west from us and hawaii. north korea had fired a miss. i'm around the same time in 2018 a system fault in europe. say a traffic control system led to more than 15000 flights being delayed in 2014 computers at the los angeles airport crashed 20 you to spy plane flew overhead. the system ran out of memory as it struggled to process the planes flight path and old for that year, an air traffic control computer glitch lead to flight delays and cancellations across the u. k. ah,

well let's bring in our guests for today's show in new jersey, kyle bailey, a former federal aviation administration safety team representative and also a pilot in washington, d. c. jody west be chief executive at global cyber risk. and in london, alex ma cherice and aviation analysts a very warm welcome to all 3 of you. thank you so much for joining us on inside story kyle, in new jersey. let me start with you. a hoax. as we heard all fights across the u. s. is extremely rare and has only happened a few times, including a during the $911.00 attacks. now the u. s. administration, the baton administration says it has no evidence that this was a cyber attack. so what could have caused this system outage in your view? its looking right now that its a corrupt data database file, that pretty much caused this glitch, and it caused the, you know, the paralysis of the airspace system. the exact cause of it right now is not known

. you know, there are some reports out there that it was caused by a single employee, but i think there is going to be a full investigation. these systems are just very antiquated. it's here in states like typical government bureaucracy systems not just yesterday, but across the board. everything pretty much is not up to speed like private sector . if this was a company like space x, you wouldn't see something like this because you know all their systems around the cutting edge. but typically how bureaucracy works. do you want to replace systems? it's a long drawn out process. there's bidding, there's contracts, and it's not just a matter of swapping our servers if you want to upgrade, upgrade a big complex system with all those data points coming into it. i mean, it could be a much, it could be years even after they have a contractor or you know, upgraded or replace it. alright. jody, let me come to you from your experience,

jody. is there any indication that this could have been foul play? could this have been intentional? well, we don't know yet, as my colleague just said, it is and determined at this point exactly what happened. however, we do know that the data base, apparently they're saying was corrupted and that was the primary database as well as the backups. and that is how malware works. that's how ransomware works. it gets in a system and at 1st now looks for backups and will corrupt that data and then go to the real data and corrupt and encrypt get. and so i think ransomware definitely is on the table, but forensic investigations of this nature do not have and quickly in many cases. so i think it's too early to tell. in any event, it was a cyber incident because it certainly involved incident response and back up recovery. and so those measures certainly made it

a cyber incident. and we found out that the backup recovery had some issues as well as just their ability to determine what happened and remain operational. if this was a breach, jody, do you think us officials would admit to it? i think, yeah, i think they would. you know that nobody has a silver bullet system. and if, if there was a ransomware that got in the system, i think they'd need to know that and, and it could impact other systems. i don't think someone was trying to hide it. ok, alex, that me come to you. the problem it said came from the pilot alerting system. the no tom system telethon tell us and explain to our view is what this pilot warning system does. how critical it is, how, how it operates. and what do you think happened here? well, fully, this is why we had such a big, almost immediate impact with, with what happened in the u. s. because it, instead of something happening in the airline operations room that would affect one

airline, or perhaps something that would affect one manufacturer. this was centralized with the f a where the no times are distributed. and no terms in simple english are essentially key information directives that are distributed to all aviation stakeholders. and in every day of the asian life. the main and primary purpose would be, for example, flight crew entering the cockpit prior to departure, and reviewing and checking the no times before departure to make sure if there are any, anything unusual ahead. we're at the destination air pulled, perhaps the active runway that they usually flying to is closed and they're using an alternative runway. perhaps there is construction on the taxiway or even cranes near by the approach path that specifically the apple once flight crew, another aviation stakeholders to be aware of. so they are key communication, essential notices that really insure the safe continuation of air travel by keeping everyone up to speed. and so with the failure of the no time system and this being

the, the specific outage that the f a suffered. we saw immediately how a decision had to be taken whereby they couldn't allow any additional aircraft to be added into the system. well, because already at that time we had hundreds and hundreds of aircraft eb. ready in the u. s. and thousands elsewhere getting ready to depart there. yeah. kyle: the u. end. a civil aviation organization i. kyle, i understand has been leading an effort to overhaul the system to make it easier for airlines and pilots to better filter information. is this new system that they're looking at? is it not in place in the us? well, to my understanding, not yet. now this old system is still completely in place so that you know, they will need some sort of, you know, additional funding or, or, or approvals for, or any kind of new system that is implemented then it will take time because, you know, the system will have to be taken down and the new system will obviously have to be better than installed and bidding process and all that. so yeah,

talk to us about the factors behind this for jelly t of the system in the u. s. you started talking about them a little earlier and they had been regional issues previously. kyle: but how widespread, where are they? and what do you think has exacerbated the problem? well, you know, we're, we're talking about pretty much old servers, servers and equipment that when they're working to do a pretty good job. i mean the know tam system is fairly simple for your audience who isn't really familiar with them. it would be similar to getting a weather for a text, but if you're doing a google search, you're going to weather website and you're reading text of a weather forecast. it would be similar to that, but you're actually updating the critical no. tam information such as you know, how it's referred to if there's a runaway closure, it would say runway to 7 left close dad, you know, london heathrow, airport or things of that nature. so it's

a very simple system in that. it's basically pilots reading text and that text could be obtained on a laptop or on software in the cockpit. yeah. but it's just the, the key here is with old software. it works well when it's working. it does a job very good. but we don't know, is this going to happen again tomorrow is going to happen a month from now. is that going to happen 10 years from now? we just don't know. so that's the issue. ok, job is very proactive and replacing systems that are very critical, especially when it comes to cyber security. but it's everything else pretty much moves at at, at a snail's pace to, to typical of government, jody kyle, phase an old system. but a simple one is there no backup to stop the, the cascading failures. there could be 2 problems here. he's right, these old systems often require old operating platforms to run on. and sometimes

those are out of support by the vendors. and that can create security issues. i'm not saying this one was that, but old systems, these old legacy applications, always present security problems and a many times at sea age old problem of it works. now we like the system, we won't replace it, it will be too expensive, it'll take too long. but we see the price of that. the other thing is that this, this clearly involved a backup restore issue. and many companies and government entities to they are replicating their data real time. so as up it's operating, it's transferring the exact same data to another location. so if something happens on that side, they could bring up the other site. well, if you don't have backups that i'm, i have a hash integrity check so that you know that nothing's been changed in that backup . then if something happens to the system goes down,

you need to restore like this corrupted database. you may not know if your restoring is accurate so that can be another problem that they run into. so what needs to happen? joining the media to, to prevent future mishaps. well, the 1st thing is obviously to make sure that all the equipment is up to date, that all the software supported by vendor support that all the patches have been applied. but also then they need to understand what happened if there was any insider problem here, or something that was a weak control to fix, to build up those controls and to try to determine the cause of the problem. so it's hard to know exactly what they need to do to prevent it from happening when we don't know yet what caused it. all right, alex, this is the 2nd major incident in less than a month for the usa, vh an industry. all these issues specific to the us or other countries and industries outweigh in the world, also vulnerable everywhere, and everyone is vulnerable to this. and what this has done is this is now renewed

and refresh the need for that conversation to keep going over the issues that the ation sector has globally. we have, you know, modern day risks of soluble, we have wouldn't a risks to do with the fight that we're running as your guest explained, old i t system which is so common across aviation. and remember that the very concept of air travel connects a to b. so while a may have the latest investments and innovation in, in the tech budgets, it's not always going to be the case for b. and that's why, you know, we need a harmonized approach to ensuring that the industry is ready for not just the movement of digitalization that is ongoing. and that is likely to, you know, have it's, it's mishaps here. and there as these upgrades take place. but also on this risk of cyber. from 2019 to 2020, we saw in europe a 530 percent increase in cyber attacks in 2020 alone. 61 percent of all the

cyber attacks in europe were to specifically to airlines. so you begin to realize quickly how information sharing is key, how taking a harmonized approach is key. and that's why you know, i k o, the centralized un body of ideation. they have an important role to play, to ensuring that in this specific area of security, no country is left behind. to what extent is information sharing happening alex, it's happening better in some parts of the world than it is others. for example, if we look at the continent of africa west still, we have so much work to do in terms of sharing and liberalizing aviation across the continent there. and it runs all the way along to the theme of security and information sharing, you know, a slowly and i think this is the good news. constance like africa are beginning to realize the benefits of becoming more liberalized and adopting something that is a project that's been in the work for so long, such as the single african market. ultimately a single african skies. that pilot with around 20 plus african member states,

including gonna ethiopia morocco that's going into place this year. and not only will that help look at the economic development, an opportunity for opening up aviation. but it really runs down to said that information sharing area, ensuring that if there are aspects of the system that are not as up to date as others in certain countries or in certain regions. and how can we work on ensuring that they also receive that upgrade and that lift because as i say, it's over a well being fine on one side with a but ultimately vi croft is traveling to be. all right, kyle, alex talked about liberal ization there. there is also the question of, of privatization which you alluded to earlier. and in the wake of this incident, there are some in the us, we're arguing that failures like this system meltdown that we saw on wednesday is why government should be removed from some aspects of air travel that could be better handled by, by, by the private sector what are your thoughts about this?

i mean that argument could go either way. i mean the government has some here in the u. s. has some great relationships with companies like l 3, l 3 harris and north to from in and companies of that nature. i think the private sector does a very good job working in concert with the government as it would be, you know, say we have flight service stations here in the u. s. used to be run by the s t a. now run by the private sector. so that relationship works very well in my opinion, and i don't, i don't think the government should be eliminated completely because they really do as far as the f a's concern from a safety perspective. they really do a very good job of what they do. ok alex you, i'm sorry. finish your thought. i'm up my finish your thought please. you know in this instance, although you know,

inconvenienced millions of air travelers with delays and misc miss connections and cancellations. the system worked as stop a catastrophe from happening. everything basically shut down, they shut the entire system down in matter minutes and the system really worked out perfectly. although people were inconvenienced for the sake of safety. alright, jody, i'll come to you just one second. but alex, i wanted to get your thoughts on this question of privatization. would privatizing some aspects of air travel like air traffic control, for example, in the us would, would that help in fixing some of the problems industry has encountered there? i think it is perhaps too broad over of a blanket approach to take that somehow the private sector has all of the answers. i think what would be better is if we, if we had more consistent commitment to these upgrades and, and if we, you know, the good thing is, is that with the current administration in the u. s, we have seen infrastructure investments that stemmed right down and across aviation

. and so you know, this is the track that, that is necessary. the funny part is that we often talk about when a child who is disrupted you to outs, geez. and due to glitches many times, these glitches are occurring because of the upgrades that are taking place for 2023 . for the next 12 months, euro control who assist with the site, the skies of europe already warning that there will be delays to travel this summer, merely because they are doing system upgrades in key european hubs and where a traffic is centralized, such as liz vernon and reams in france, so you know, it's a bumpy road of course, but i don't think to go back to a question of the private sector has all of the answers, but perhaps more integration in various different areas could bring a, could help modernize the sector. alright, jody computer systems are hierarchical, of course, looking at the broader infrastructure system. how robust are these key systems around the world to deal with the issues that they're faced with today?

well, they were in an interconnected global network and this incident highlights that very clearly. and highlights the impact that can have this kind of incident can have where it's a domino effect. one, the company, one government agency may have an absolutely robust, everything's perfect where there's a control security controls. everything's up to date. and yet if that system goes down or another system impacts it, then, then the systems can crash or the systems can have problems. so the interconnected nature is something that we have to understand where as part of how we live today is how we operate. and so just saying that one vulnerability in one company is they're not up to speed or they need a better app or the government needs a better app. we're also interconnected that, that risk flows to everybody else. so it really is a, at everyone's depend on everyone else in this type of system where everyone is

relying on an information system that puts out information for air control. you can be sure that whatever the answer is to the problem, that people will take notes. but in my experience, private sector systems have often just as many weaknesses or worse than government systems because there's not as good oversight from those systems. so i think we have to figure out what happened here. but we have to understand the interconnected nature of how we operate today. these kinds of things can happen. ok, kind let me get your thoughts on, on how we fix the, the problem. what's the answer short and long term to, to solving these own abilities. you know, i think there will be investigations as a result of this incident, whether it be with congressional investigation or whether it will be conducting the,

you know, from the office of the f, a administrator. and from that i think you know, that this might be a wakeup. busy for perhaps congress to increase funding for various projects that perhaps they might have overlooked in the past. and from the standpoint just from their side alone, just looking at the projects that are in the pipeline. and maybe we again, evaluating, you know, what are the top priorities and what should be addressed immediately and what maybe they could put on the back burner for a time being. ok, so sorry, alex, let me give you the last word. cause say this is a wake up call and you know, they should be increased funding to the f a. what do you feel? should be the priorities right now to solve this issue and make sure it doesn't happen again in the near future. what of course will it's inevitable. we're going to see more of these issues, whether or not they're related to the older i, t and o to tech, or of course, that ongoing risk of cyber and the cyber attacks that hit the industry daily. what

i hope that the globe where the ation sector, which is so well harmonized takes from this is the importance of ensuring that every, all of the systems are up to date and keeping their infrastructure is as modern as possible. but also ensuring, as i said earlier, that no countries left behind, you know, the u. n. special agency, i k o they want to see in ideation across the world, more personnel who are well versed in both aviation. i'm cybersecurity, but that's going to require investments. so these are conversations that have to be taking place across governments as we move into different areas of risks in 2015 and we saw in sweden, part of their i tried to control abilities was shut down for 5 days. initially, it was blamed on a solar flare. later it turned out to be a malicious cyber attack. so we know that not always is everything as it seems from the early on period in the early on days. but i hope that that conversation is started now to address both these areas to be asian,

and i'm sure we'll learn more in the next few days when, when does this investigation happens as to what exactly happened with this incident? thank you. all 3 of you for a very interesting conversation, kyle bailey, jody westby and alex much harris. and thank you as well for watching. you can always watch this program again any time by visiting our website at al jazeera dot com for further discussion. go to our facebook page at facebook dot com, forward slash ha inside story. and of course you can join the conversation on twitter. i handle is that ha inside story from me fully back in the whole team here in doha. thanks for watching bye for now. ah and

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