FAA Lifts Nationwide Ground Stop After Old Equipment Fails

The Federal Aviation Administration ended a nationwide halt to US flights on the evening of November 13, according to Engadget. The suspension was lifted at 8:15PM Eastern, after grounding all departures for hours from that afternoon.

Transportation secretary Sean Duffy told reporters at a press conference that aging equipment was at fault. He described the country's air traffic control setup as very old, and he also pointed at Congress for declining to pay for upgrades.

The disruption was severe. Hundreds of flights were scrapped, thousands already in the air were sent to different airports, and millions of travelers were left waiting. The FAA has ordered only three such nationwide halts this century, and this one ranked second in length behind the stoppage that followed the 9/11 attacks.

Duffy gave a detailed account of the failure. He said the US still relies on TDM telecom, a legacy analog technology, to move information between facilities. Its routers became overloaded with data, and at 3:36PM on the 13th they began sending out inconsistent information. Equipment that had already been swapped out was not affected, he said, only the older gear.

The secretary also said the country did not lose all communications and radar. Even so, the FAA chose to stop flights as a precaution.

He warned that the problem will return. According to the New York Times, he asked how many more incidents are needed before Congress provides the money to fix the system.

Congress has already allocated $12.5 billion for modernizing air traffic facilities, and Duffy has been seeking another $30 billion.

Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin joined Duffy at the briefing. He said nothing so far points to a cyberattack, though his agency is still investigating and will not exclude that possibility. Mullin also said the event had no connection to the Microsoft outage that lasted more than a day.