Federal officials are renewing urgent calls for $50 billion to overhaul the nation’s aging air traffic control infrastructure following a four-hour nationwide ground stop Friday that stranded thousands of travelers and disrupted the weekend flight schedule.
The Federal Aviation Administration halted all commercial departures around 4 p.m. EST Friday after outdated analog telecommunications equipment became overloaded with data, causing intermittent communication failures across 17 regional facilities.
Airspace reopened at roughly 8:15 p.m., though Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that untangling the cascading delays and cancellations across major carriers — including American Airlines Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., and United Airlines Inc. — would stretch into Sunday.
During a Saturday update, Duffy attributed the outage to contractor maintenance work at a remote location involving the replacement of decades-old copper wiring with fiber-optic lines.
The Department of Transportation is investigating whether an error by longtime FAA contractor L3Harris or a faulty router triggered data inconsistencies that forced officials to systematically land more than 3,500 aircraft out of caution.
“We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s[-era] little copper lines. It’s an old system that went down,” Duffy said, promising accountability for contractors delivering subpar service. “All of the new equipment that we put in, none of that went down.”
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford apologized to the public for the disruption, which impacted a system that typically handles over 30,000 flights and 2.5 million passengers daily, though medical flights remained exempt.
Bedford and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin emphasized that travelers were never in danger and dismissed speculation of a cyberattack, artificial intelligence (AI) interference, or links to a Thursday Microsoft Corp. outage. Mullin noted that federal authorities are utilizing FEMA resources to deliver medications to stranded airport passengers.
The incident marks the first nationwide ground stop since a 90-minute system failure in January 2023, and the most extensive halt to American air travel since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In the wake of the shutdown, Duffy and Mullin pressed Congress to approve $50 billion for a complete modernization of aviation hardware, software, and telecommunications, a sharp increase from the $30 billion Duffy requested in late September and the $12.5 billion lawmakers approved last year. While copper-to-fiber replacements are more than 70% complete, the project is not slated to finish until 2032 without accelerated funding.
Pressed on why Republicans, who hold congressional majorities, have not passed the additional funding, Duffy maintained that bipartisan backing is necessary to push the package through.
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers demanded immediate oversight.
Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington announced that the Senate Commerce Committee will review primary and backup aviation communication technologies, while Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois called for a thorough investigation into why system redundancies failed.
