US flight shutdown exposes deepening air traffic network crisis

Detailed summary

The nationwide flight shutdown on Friday (Nov 13) has exposed longstanding weaknesses in the US air traffic control network, raising questions about whether billions of dollars in…

The nationwide flight shutdown on Friday (Nov 13) has exposed longstanding weaknesses in the US air traffic control network, raising questions about whether billions of dollars in modernisation efforts can prevent further disruptions.

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

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) 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 4pm Eastern Time (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 US$30.1 billion from Congress to upgrade airports and air traffic control, including US$10.1 billion for air traffic control modernisation.

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.

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