An ageing air traffic control network, relying on decades-old copper cables, outdated switches and routers, was at the centre of a major disruption that brought US flight departures to a nationwide halt for five hours on Friday. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed the ground stop citing “extraordinary circumstances and reasons for safety”, after a telecommunications outage affected air route traffic control centres across the country.The disruption, which was the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years and only the second such shutdown since the September 11, 2001, attacks, grounded thousands of flights and left passengers stranded at airports. The FAA lifted the order on Friday evening (local time), but officials warned that restoring normal flight operations would take time.
Old tech behind outage
US transportation secretary Sean Duffy said the outage occurred after switches and routers became overloaded with data and failed. Officials acknowledged that the introduction of new technology had put additional pressure on older components of the air traffic control network, resulting in intermittent communication and radar gaps.“We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines. It’s an old system that went down and went down everywhere. It got overloaded,” Al Jazeera quoted him as saying.The incident has also drawn attention to concerns about the state of US aviation infrastructure that had been flagged before the disruption.
Report flagged issue
A September report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) highlighted ageing telecommunications infrastructure, including copper cables dating back to the 1960s, and warned that delays in modernisation could increase the risk of further operational disruptions.The report also pointed to shortcomings in the FAA’s approach to implementing upgrades. Officials were prioritising faster changes without adequately scheduling them, resulting in multiple switches taking place simultaneously and putting additional pressure on the system.Tony Stanton, a former senior executive with Australia’s civil aviation safety authority, said the outage was particularly concerning because the risks had already been identified.“That’s incredibly surprising to me when there was a report published only in September that absolutely talked to this risk at hand that we’re seeing today,” Al Jazeera quoted him as saying.Stanton said the FAA needed stronger contingency arrangements to ensure that technical failures did not translate into widespread disruption.“These are things that can be foreseen, can be anticipated, and we should have plans in place so that the system has a minor impact rather than the major impact we’re seeing today,” he said.The failure appeared to affect air route traffic control centres, which manage aircraft travelling between different parts of the country.Aviation safety expert Todd Curtis, chief executive of AirSafe.com, said the US has 21 such centres, including one in Alaska and 20 across the lower 48 states. Their operations involve multiple handovers between air traffic controllers as aircraft move through different regions.The FAA ordered all departing flights to remain on the ground from 3:54pm eastern time on Friday. Aircraft already airborne were allowed to continue to their destinations and land, while international departures were considered on a case-by-case basis.FlightRadar24 figures showed that more than 4,700 flights were cancelled and around 10,000 delayed on Friday. Another 700 cancellations had already been recorded for Saturday.Homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin said passengers and aircraft were safe, ruling out a suspected cyberattack and saying the incident was not “another 9/11”.Duffy, meanwhile, called for $50 billion in upgrades to the country’s air traffic control infrastructure, acknowledging that the system needed substantial modernisation.Although the ground stop was lifted after about five hours, the disruption was expected to have a longer impact on airline schedules. Duffy said it would take time for operations to return to full capacity, while aviation experts warned that the interconnected nature of airline networks could prolong delays as carriers reposition aircraft and rebook passengers.