A nationwide ground stop that halted air travel across the United States on Friday evening has exposed continuing weaknesses in the Federal Aviation Administration’s ageing air traffic control infrastructure, after overloaded communications lines disrupted contact between controllers and pilots.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the outdated system had become overwhelmed and begun to fail. The FAA has not yet identified the precise cause of the breakdown.
The action was only the third nationwide ground stop issued by the FAA this century, eclipsing the disruption caused by previous failures in air traffic communications equipment.
The incident has renewed questions over whether the federal authorities have installed enough backup systems to protect air traffic from major or potentially catastrophic failures.
Air traffic control system exposed by repeated failures
For decades, the system has relied on analogue copper wire, floppy disks and alphabetical keyboards so old that the FAA has struggled to find replacement parts.
Congress approved 12.5 billion dollars last year to help fund upgrades, following a series of outages at air traffic control facilities, including the centre serving Newark Liberty International Airport. Those failures caused serious losses of radar and other communications capabilities.
L3 Harris, the main telecommunications contractor overseeing the upgrades, said earlier this month that about 70 per cent of the copper lines had been converted to fibre-optic cable. The FAA also announced last week that it would begin phasing out floppy disks.
But a series of incidents in recent months has shown that the upgraded infrastructure remains vulnerable. In September, a circuit failure at a regional air traffic facility left operators without a backup after 600 feet of fibre-optic cable was unexpectedly severed by a construction crew working on an Amtrak project in New Jersey.
More than 430 flights were cancelled before the system was restored several hours later. In October, a contractor carrying out plumbing work accidentally cut a fibre line at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, forcing a ground stop that lasted several hours.
The following day, George Bush International Airport in Houston was also forced to impose a ground stop after another contractor inadvertently severed a fibre line.
Officials have acknowledged that replacing copper with fibre alone will not prevent failures. The FAA has said it would ideally move data into cloud services, allowing traffic to be rerouted through multiple backup pathways when a fibre connection is cut.
“Today we have physical fiber and when it’s cut, there’s one redundancy, and when we lose that, there’s no more redundancy,” Mr Bedford told reporters at the time.
Washington blame game over upgrade funding
Friday’s nationwide ground stop prompted a fresh dispute in Washington over the cost and pace of modernising the system. Mr Duffy blamed Congress for failing to provide sufficient funding and called for 50 billion dollars in emergency money.
“How many more times does this have to happen for Congress to give the money to fix it?” he told reporters at the White House on Friday night.
Mr Duffy said the lack of funding had left his department pursuing patchwork improvements that were not sufficient. His latest demand is a sharp increase from the 30 billion dollars he had sought in recent months.
However, lawmakers from both parties have questioned how effectively the FAA and Mr Duffy have used the money already allocated.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader, said the breakdown was “the latest in a series of unacceptable air travel incidents under the Trump administration’s failed leadership”, accusing the administration of refusing to accept responsibility.
