FAA was warned for years about repair risks leading to nationwide ground stop

Detailed summary

Federal aviation officials were repeatedly warned that the push to rapidly modernize the nation s air traffic control system risked breaking it, ...

Federal aviation officials were repeatedly warned that the push to rapidly modernize the nation’s air traffic control system risked breaking it, with the potential dangers spelled out in government reports in the months and years leading up to Friday’s nationwide ground stop that halted flights for nearly 4½ hours coast to coast.

A government watchdog report in September cautioned that the way the old, legacy systems were being replaced could result in disruptions - including ground stops.

A separate Federal Aviation Administration-commissioned safety review in 2023 also warned about potential air traffic disruptions from the agency’s technology updates, saying the FAA needed to ensure the old systems were preserved during the critical changeover period.

The predicted disruptions arrived Friday, resulting in more than 12,000 flight cancellations with outrage and delays rippling across the weekend.

Federal officials blamed a remote, overloaded router that a contractor was installing as part of a long-running effort to replace copper wires with fiber cables for air traffic communications nationwide. The router was sending “over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds,” causing “instability” with the system that allows controllers to talk with planes cruising at high altitudes, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said Saturday.

Duffy painted it as an isolated incident, saying it was either a contractor’s error or faulty equipment. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said they needed to push ahead with the work. “It will continue to break until we replace it,” he said.

But the September report from the Government Accountability Office found that the FAA’s approach to delivering Duffy’s so-called Brand New Air Traffic Control System has prioritized “speed at the risk of cost uncertainty and potential disruptions.”

The effort involves more than 11,000 individual projects that GAO found were not being run with an overarching schedule.

“Their approach could be a sound…

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