CATRes brings together researchers and industry veterans across the US to address critical challenges facing the National Airspace System (NAS). The need for improved resiliency is evidenced by several recent failures resulting in large-scale outages affecting millions of travelers.
On July 19th, 2024, an IT outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike software update forced various airlines to cancel large numbers of flights; one airline, Delta, canceled 46% of its flights on that day, impacting over one million Delta passengers until service was restored on July 25th.
On January 11, 2023, the FAA ordered a ground stop lasting nearly two hours due to a NOTAM database failure. This system outage caused widespread delays and cancellations, delaying over 10,000 flights and canceling an additional 1,300. One-month prior, Southwest Airlines canceled more than 13,000 flights over several days; while a severe winter storm did impact operations, a large proportion of these cancellations could have been prevented by better planning, as other airlines canceled a much smaller percentage of their flights.
When brief outages have the potential to take the entire US air system offline and impact the travel of millions, improvements must be made. As these events have increased in frequency and severity in recent years, CATRes aims to improve NAS resilience through systemic stress testing and hardening.
The CATRes team consists of Aerospace researchers, transportation academics, and aviation professionals, led by individuals from the University of California Berkeley, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. We are confident that with NASA's support, CATRes can positively impact the aviation industry by developing a more resilient and improved NAS.