The Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday that it will deploy a new database for pilot messages by September, following a series of outages that have raised safety concerns.

The FAA announced that it has selected CGI Federal to modernize the “Notice to Airmen”, a system that provides critical safety information to pilots, flight crews, and other users of U.S. Airspace. The failure of the NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) system in January 2023 caused more than 11,000 flights to be cancelled, marking the first U.S. ground stop since 2001.

A hardware problem caused the system to fail for over three hours on March 22, 2018. It was also down on February 1st.

CGI aims to deploy the NOTAM modernization service by September, while the FAA aims for July.

The FAA did not immediately disclose the value of the contract. Nick Daniels, the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, testified to Congress in March about how replacing NOTAM will cost hundreds and millions of dollars.

Daniels stated that the FAA would need at least $154 million for further research into a replacement system of NOTAM, but $354 million in order to replace the current system.

Earlier this month, a bipartisan group of six U.S. lawmakers, led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., noted that Congress passed legislation requiring the FAA to implement a modernized NOTAM system and backup system by September 2024 — a deadline now missed.

Notams provide information to flight planners and pilots about temporary changes, such as airport closures, restrictions in airspace, the status of taxiway lights, and other obstructions. The FAA reported that more than 4 million NOTAMs were issued each year.

Sean Duffy, Transportation Secretary, said last month that he would ask Congress for billions of dollars to fund a multiyear project to upgrade the FAA air traffic control infrastructure and increase hiring. Duffy stated on Monday that the NOTAM is “deeply outdated and shows serious cracks”.

Modernization will allow for near-real-time data exchange hosted securely in the cloud.