Chaos and confusion settled last night at United States airports after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a national suspension of all air traffic in the country. The extraordinary measure, due to a problem attributed by the authorities to “obsolete” communication systems, exposed the US aeronautical infrastructure, with a stoppage that lasted up to four and a half hours, the longest since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
More than 15,000 flights were affected by delays and cancellations on Friday, which continued on Saturday with another 3,300 flights cancelled, according to data from air tracking service FlightAware. In an impromptu press conference from the White House, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Friday night that the suspension had been lifted, but operations were still going to take a while to “return to normal,” something they hope will happen by the Thanksgiving holiday next week.
The secretary, a former Fox News host, did not initially give a very detailed explanation of the reasons that led to the technical failure, which sparked speculation about possible sabotage. This Saturday, he appeared from the headquarters of the Department of Transportation, from where he attributed the drop in communications to a “decades-old telecommunications and air traffic control system,” but he also directly blamed the contractor that owns the communications network, L3Harris, which “was not up to par.”
“At at least one of our remote FAA facilities, a contractor was performing routine maintenance tasks to replace telecommunications lines from old copper cables with fiber optics,” he explained. "The work that was being carried out was due to the age of the copper cables that we were replacing. They were so old that they were going to stop being used."
At that time, the router that L3Harris was replacing, manufactured in 2001, "began to overwhelm other routers in our air traffic control system. Specifically, we received more than 1,000 connection attempts every four or five seconds. This caused problems in our communications with the aircraft and also some interruptions in radar signals." When they detected this situation, they decided to close the airspace until they could “isolate the problem” and achieve “complete operability.”
Duffy has insisted that they do not believe “at all” that it is a cyber attack. "What happened was that an FAA system was not up to the task. Our contractor was not up to par, or the equipment was not up to par, and that caused the interruptions," he said.
Last night, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was “no indication” or “reason to believe” that the outage “constitutes a threat to the United States.” Although he did not rule out the possibility of sabotage, he sent a message of calm to the population: "Everything points to a simple failure in telecommunications. However, we continue to investigate it, so we are not going to rule out that possibility."
At 3:54 p.m. on Friday, the FAA sent a cable to all airports in the country in which it ordered the suspension of internal flights, citing “extraordinary circumstances” and “security reasons,” and ordered that all air traffic remain “grounded until further notice.” At that time, more than 3,500 aircraft were flying, so their safe landing was prioritized while a solution to the problem was sought.
The first explanation for what happened was given by Secretary Duffy through his social networks, where he attributed the chaos to “a communication problem that affects all air traffic control centers en route.” The ruling affected the 22 regional air control centers in the United States, in charge of directing planes on their journeys between the country's airports, which led the authorities to decree the national suspension of air traffic.
The last time a similar measure was ordered was in January 2023, when due to a computer system breakdown, communication with the pilots stopped working. Before that episode, the last suspension in this area occurred after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. To avoid comparisons, Mullin spent the entire Friday afternoon insisting: "It is not an episode like 9/11. There is no reason to worry about your loved ones if they are flying."
The aviation sector has been complaining for some time that the communications system is obsolete and needs to be renewed. Congress approved $12.5 billion last year to renovate it, and since then, miles of old copper cables have been replaced with fiber optic lines, as well as several of the old radio systems at multiple airports.
The White House has also requested another $30 billion to fix other communications-related problems, although the legislature has not yet put it to a vote. Transport Secretary Duffy has taken advantage of the situation to urgently demand its approval.
“This is going to continue to fail,” he anticipated last night. “How many times does something like this have to happen before Congress puts in the money to fix it?” The truth is that Duffy has been in office for two years and with a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, so the responsibility for the fact that nothing has been done in this time falls on his party.
