FAA lifts nationwide ground stop after air traffic control failure

Flights resume after hours on the ground

The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop at 8:15PM Eastern time on 13 November, according to Engadget. The order had halted flights across the United States for hours after starting in the afternoon.

The disruption was severe. Hundreds of flights were cancelled, thousands of aircraft already in the air were diverted, and millions of passengers were left stranded while the stop was in force.

Engadget notes the FAA has issued ground stops only three times this century, and this one was the second longest on record.

Old equipment blamed for the failure

Transportation secretary Sean Duffy held a press conference after the suspension was lifted. He blamed what he called the country's incredibly old air traffic control system for the malfunction.

The problem lay in how information travels between air traffic facilities. The US still uses TDM telecom, a legacy analog telecommunications technology, to move that data. Duffy said its routers became overloaded with data, and by 3:36PM on 13 November they began transmitting inconsistent information.

He stressed that equipment already replaced in modernisation work was not affected, only the older hardware. He also clarified that the country did not lose all communications and radar, but the FAA grounded flights out of an abundance of caution.

No confirmed cyberattack, officials say

Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin appeared alongside Duffy and said there was no indication that a cyberattack caused the communication problems. He added that his agency was still looking into the matter and would not rule one out.

Mullin also said the incident was not related to a lengthy outage that took Microsoft's services offline for more than 24 hours. That connection had been a natural question given the timing, but officials separated the two events.

Funding fight over modernisation

Duffy used the press conference to press Congress for money. Congress has already given the FAA 12.5 billion dollars to modernise the country's air traffic facilities, but he has been seeking 30 billion dollars more.

According to the New York Times, Duffy warned reporters that the system is going to continue to fail, and asked how many times an incident like this must happen before Congress provides the funding to fix it.

For travellers, the episode is a reminder that the systems keeping aircraft safely separated depend on infrastructure that predates modern networking. Until the upgrades are funded and installed, similar failures remain possible.