David Sucy News Today

am taking the train. >> kaitlan, thank you very much. we appreciate it. "cnn newsroom" starts right now, of course, with the breaking news as well. ♪ good wednesday morning to you, im jim sciutto. >> and im erica hill. we are following the breaking news this morning after u.s. flights were grounded, the faa now lifting that ground stop. u.s. flights resuming here. there is, though, as you can imagine a huge mess unfolding at airports across this country and, frankly, around the wor...

Even your connecting flights are all going to be not departing or not starting to move until that time. this is a nationwide issue, its not just a local issue. and, again, we will offer some snacks up front here. help yourself. >> reporter: so thats in state college, pennsylvania. but here in newark things are beginning to get back to normal. this was one of the first airports right here at nuke and atlanta hartsfield-jackson the first airports to get flights going again because of the backlog t...

Relies on the notam system, always have, in my 30, 40 years in aviation i have never known this system to go down. so i think this is a significant problem right now. >> so to that point, david, what vulnerabilities in this system could this expose? and, again, were early, they havent figured out what brought it down, but the idea that a system like this could bring basically the whole air transportation system down and very quickly, listen, thats worri worrisome. >> its very worrisome and even ...

Centralized database for anything thats abnormal they can also do their own checks, they can reach out to the airports, look at the individual airports to see whats going on at the receiving airport or any alternate airports that they might have selected and they can also do some end route information as well, but its very time consuming. once they do that the big shift here is the fact that the pilots themselves and the dispatcher are taking on that responsibility to make sure that theres no ab...

Displayed. it has you confirm that you read t it says, yeah, i read this, i know that. so its shifted the responsibility now over to the pilots and the dispatchers. so were going to continue to see delays because theyre going to now have to check every airport, every route 25 miles both left and right on that route to see if theres anything that might affect that flight. so theres going to be continued delays. >> so, david, early on this morning as we were watching this, we saw that -- weve hear...

Switch be recording, would changes to that switch be recorded. >> thats an interesting question. on the later aircraft im sure that the answer is yes. this is an early aircraft thats obviously been retrofitted to meet the new standards after 9/11. after 9/11 there was extensive research done and new protocols developed on how to protect the cockpit, how pilots were to respond to a potential hijacking. i cant say way surance that in an older aircraft like this that these procedures, that these po...