Nationwide Flight Shutdown Exposes Deepening Air Traffic Network Crisis

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Friday’s shutdown was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when a failure of the FAA system that distributes critical safety notices to pilots halted departures…

CHICAGO, Nov 13 (Reuters) - A communications failure that halted flight departures across the United States on Friday has renewed scrutiny of the country’s aging air traffic control network, raising questions about its resilience even as the government spends billions of dollars to modernize it.

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a nationwide ground stop, preventing aircraft from departing US airports, following “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a post on X.

Duffy later attributed the outage to a problem with the FAA’s legacy network, saying switches and routers had become overloaded with data and went down. It was not immediately clear what caused the equipment overload.

The FAA lifted the ground stop after more than four hours, but Duffy warned that it would take time for air traffic operations to return to full capacity.

More than 1.5 million passengers were scheduled to depart US airports on roughly 11,000 flights after 4 p.m. ET (2100 GMT), shortly after the ground stop began, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

The shutdown came on the same day the White House and Transportation Department sought another $30.1 billion from Congress to upgrade airports and air traffic control, including $10.1 billion for air traffic control modernization.

Much of the system’s underlying weakness has been documented for years.

The Government Accountability Office reported in 2024 that the FAA had classified 51 of its 138 air traffic control systems as unsustainable and another 54 as potentially unsustainable. Together, they accounted for more than three-quarters of the systems reviewed.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told Reuters in September that the agency’s more than 300 air traffic facilities operated as technological silos, relying in some cases on decades-old computers and telecommunications systems that cannot communicate seamlessly with one another.

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