WASHINGTON — On February 7th, a group of high-profile figures in aviation safety will appear before Congress to testify. The list includes a safety official from the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board chair, and the head of the largest pilots union.

This hearing, titled "Enhancing America's Gold Standard in Aviation Safety," is taking place in the wake of increased scrutiny of the FAA. This follows a computer outage last month that caused the first nationwide flight suspension since the September 11th, 2001 attacks and impacted over 11,000 flights.

On the other hand, the Federal Aviation Administration informed lawmakers that the U.S. government implemented new safeguards in the aviation notification system that caused widespread disruptions earlier this month. The move is aimed at avoiding similar failures in the future.

FAA had reported that the Notice to Air Missions (Notam) system experienced a failure on January 11th, leading to widespread flight delays and cancellations. The malfunction was caused by unidentified employees of a federal contractor who inadvertently deleted a critical data file. As a result, the FAA was forced to temporarily halt all departures for over 90 minutes, as pilots are required to review the latest safety notices prior to takeoff.