The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop on Saturday evening, ending a massive disruption that grounded flights across the United States for several hours. The suspension began in the afternoon of November 13 and caused hundreds of cancellations, thousands of diversions, and left millions of passengers stranded at airports nationwide.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy held a press conference shortly after the suspension was lifted at 8:15 PM Eastern Time. He placed the blame squarely on the country’s aging infrastructure, describing the air traffic control system as “incredibly old.” Duffy pointed to a specific failure in the legacy Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) telecommunications technology used to transmit data between facilities. He stated that routers handling this outdated analog technology became overloaded with data, leading to inconsistent information being transmitted by 3:36 PM.
Legacy Equipment Overloaded
Duffy clarified that the malfunction did not result in a total loss of communications or radar. Instead, the inconsistent data prompted the FAA to take an abundance of caution and halt all flights. He noted that facilities that had already undergone modernization were not affected by the outage, isolating the issue to the remaining old equipment. The secretary warned that the current system is prone to repeated failures.
“It’s going to continue to fail,” Duffy told reporters, according to the New York Times. “How many times does this have to happen for Congress to give the money to fix it?”
This incident marks the third time the FAA has issued a ground stop in the current century. It was the second longest such event, trailing only the massive grounding that occurred in the wake of the September 11 attacks. While Congress has previously allocated $12.5 billion for modernizing air traffic facilities, Duffy is currently seeking an additional $30 billion to fully upgrade the network.
No Cyberattack Suspected
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin joined Duffy at the press conference to address security concerns. Mullin stated there was no evidence suggesting the communication issues were the result of a cyberattack. However, he emphasized that the Department of Homeland Security was still investigating the incident and would not rule out malicious intent entirely.
Mullin also clarified that this outage was unrelated to the major Microsoft service disruption that had affected global IT systems for over 24 hours prior to this event. The FAA’s decision to ground flights was driven solely by the internal telecommunications failure within the air traffic control network.
Source: Engadget
