WASHINGTON (AP) – The 
nationwide ground stop that brought air travel across the U.S. to a halt on Saturday has highlighted persistent weaknesses in the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) ageing air traffic control infrastructure that has had several disruptive failures in recent months.
Officials called for the rare ground stop after outdated communications lines became overloaded and began to fail, interrupting communication between air traffic controllers and pilots, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
The breakdown occurred less than two months after a circuit failure and severed fibre optic cable caused crippling ground stops and delays at airports along the East Coast. Smaller outages unfolded in October at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina and George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, when contractors accidentally cut into a fibre line.
The Nov 13 ground stop, which was only the third the FAA has issued this century, eclipsed the fallout of previous air traffic communications equipment failures. The FAA has yet to identify precisely what caused communications lines to falter.
But the successive episodes have underscored the structural vulnerabilities that continue to hamper air traffic controllers’ ability to safely manage flight traffic, even after concerted efforts to make improvements. And they raised questions about whether the federal authorities have done enough to create backup systems and redundancies to prevent disruptive or even catastrophic failures.
For decades, air traffic communications have relied on a system that runs on analogue copper wire, floppy disks and alphabetical keyboards so old that the FAA has difficulty sourcing spare parts. In 2025, Congress approved US$12.5 billion (S$16.1 billion) in funding to help pay for upgrades, after a series of outages in air traffic control facilities, including the one serving Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, caused alarming losses of radar and other communications capabilities.
Earlier in November, L3Harris, the primary telecoms contractor tasked to manage the system upgrades, boasted on its website that it had converted about 70% of the copper line to fibre optic cable; last week, the FAA announced it would begin to phase out floppy disks.