Here’s an ().
I have a theory related to that.
Maybe the solar weather conditions made it unsafe to fly (radiation is higher at high altitudes), but rather than announce that over the standard alerting systems those systems were intentionally taken offline and an unknown cause was blamed for the outages.
Here’s the FAA tweet on the Notice to Air Missions system:
Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted. We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem.
Here is the first part of the article on the Pilot Alerting System going down:
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allowed some flights to resume after an outage of the system that alerts pilots to any obstructions before take-off had earlier forced the civil aviation regulator to ground all aircraft in the United States.
Severe solar conditions could cause an alert on both of those systems. If they wanted to keep planes grounded during a solar storm, but not tell anyone why, they could take both of those systems offline.
If you’re wondering why the powers that be would want to hide a severe solar storm from us, it’s because it could bring widespread attention to the Earth’s weakening magnetic field and .
Space weather conditions generally affect amateur radio, and other than a couple of flares over the last few months, nothing of note has happened in that arena.
(post is archived)