FAA Was Warned for Years About Modernization Risks Before the Nationwide Ground Stop
On Friday, Nov. 13, departures stopped nationwide for more than four hours and more than 12,000 flights were canceled. The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the ground stop at 8:15 p.m. that night. According to a Washington Post report published Nov. 14, the episode was not a sudden accident. The FAA had been warned for years about this kind of risk.
The cause was an overloaded router that communications equipment company L3Harris was installing. According to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the router tried to connect more than 1,000 times every four to five seconds, destabilizing the air traffic communications system. How a single router paralyzed the national air network has not yet been explained.
The Government Accountability Office, in a September 2026 report, said the FAA prioritized speed while accepting cost uncertainty and the risk of outages. The report said more than 11,000 individual projects were proceeding without an overall schedule. That meant there was no single timetable showing how far the replacement work had come or what remained.
A safety review the FAA commissioned in 2023 also warned that old systems had to be preserved while technology was being replaced. An aviation expert group report issued in November of that year also flagged the risk in the copper communications network. The Post reported that the expert group was disbanded shortly after President Donald Trump took office.
The Official Account and the Technicians’ Rebuttal
Duffy described the episode as an isolated incident. He said the cause was a contractor error or faulty equipment. He said the work went ahead on a Friday afternoon because the upgrades were urgent.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said something different. He said the system will keep failing until it is replaced. The two accounts left the cause unclear, whether it was a contractor error or the aging of the system itself.
The union representing the technicians who work on the system raised another problem. According to the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, known as PASS, the contractor carried out the work without a risk assessment by FAA employees, and union technicians were not involved. The people who should have assessed the risk were left out of the work.
The American air traffic control system is so old that parts are sometimes bought on the internet auction site eBay, and floppy disks and paper strips are still in use, the Post reported. The paper strips on which controllers write down aircraft information are unchanged from decades ago.
Money is also part of the problem. Duffy asked for $31.5 billion to modernize air traffic control but received $12.5 billion. After the ground stop, Duffy raised the amount he is seeking to $50 billion, POLITICO reported. The switch from copper to fiber optic cable, handled by L3Harris, is about 70 percent complete. A former FAA safety official warned that the same kind of accident could recur if the timetable is unrealistic.
The Washington Post report said there is still no answer to why a single router stopped the nation or why the FAA, despite the warnings, never set an overall schedule. The risk remains until the replacement is finished, Bedford said.
