Ground stop highlights chronic vulnerabilities in US air traffic system

WASHINGTON – The nationwide ground stop that brought air travel across the US to a halt on Nov 13 has highlighted persistent weaknesses in the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) ageing air traffic control infrastructure that has had several disruptive failures in recent months.

Officials called for the rare ground stop after outdated communications lines became overloaded and began to fail, interrupting communication between air traffic controllers and pilots, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

The breakdown occurred less than two months after a circuit failure and severed fibre optic cable caused crippling ground stops and delays at airports along the East Coast. Smaller outages unfolded in October at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina and George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, when contractors accidentally cut into a fibre line.

The Nov 13 ground stop, which was only the third the FAA has issued this century, eclipsed the fallout of previous air traffic communications equipment failures. The FAA has yet to identify precisely what caused communications lines to falter.

But the successive episodes have underscored the structural vulnerabilities that continue to hamper air traffic controllers’ ability to safely manage flight traffic, even after concerted efforts to make improvements. And they raised questions about whether the federal authorities have done enough to create backup systems and redundancies to prevent disruptive or even catastrophic failures.

For decades, air traffic communications have relied on a system that runs on analogue copper wire, floppy disks and alphabetical keyboards so old that the FAA has difficulty sourcing spare parts. In 2025, Congress approved US$12.5 billion (S$16.1 billion) in funding to help pay for upgrades, after a series of outages in air traffic control facilities, including the one serving Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, caused alarming losses of radar and other communications capabilities.

Earlier in November, L3Harris, the primary telecoms contractor tasked to manage the system upgrades, boasted on its website that it had converted about 70% of the copper line to fibre optic cable; last week, the FAA announced it would begin to phase out floppy disks.

But the disruptions in recent weeks showed that those upgrades had serious vulnerabilities themselves.

In September, when a circuit at a regional air traffic facility failed, operators had no backup options beyond the fibre line, 183m of which they discovered – to their surprise – had been severed by a construction crew in New Jersey working on an Amtrak project. More than 430 flights were cancelled before the system was fixed several hours later.

A similar incident occurred in October at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, when a contractor working on plumbing accidentally severed a fibre line. The airport was forced to issue a ground stop for several hours. Just one day after that, officials were forced to issue a ground stop at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, when yet another contractor inadvertently severed a fibre line.

The fibre line upgrades themselves, FAA administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters at the time, were not enough to save the system from failure.

Ideally, the FAA wanted to put data into cloud services, he told reporters then, so that “when you have a fibre cut, you have multiple pathways of backup”.

“Today, we have physical fibre, and when it’s cut, there’s one redundancy, and when we lose that, there’s no more redundancy,” he added.

The Nov 13 national ground stop revealed that the lack of redundancies in the FAA’s system could trigger catastrophic failures in other ways and touched off a blame game in Washington. Duffy seized on the chaos to hammer Congress, saying it had failed to pony up enough funding to pay for system-wide upgrades.

“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 the night of Nov 13, asking that lawmakers approve US$50 billion in emergency funds for the project. Their lack of action, he said, had forced his department to pursue patchwork upgrades that were insufficient. It was a dramatic increase in his demand for more money which, for the past several months, had hovered at US$30 billion.

But lawmakers in both parties are raising questions about how efficiently Duffy and the FAA have been spending the money they have already been given.

“Today’s unprecedented breakdown is the latest in a series of unacceptable air travel incidents under the Trump administration’s failed leadership,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, said in a statement issued shortly after Duffy’s news conference, accusing the administration of failing to take responsibility for its failures in “the latest in a series of unacceptable air travel incidents”. NYTIMES