22 U.S. Air Traffic Centers Affected by Communications Failure as Departures Halted as a Precaution
Key Facts
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration ordered departures halted nationwide on November 13 after a communications failure affected 22 regional air traffic control centers, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said. The centers direct aircraft on flights between airports, making the failure an issue for the nationwide air traffic network. The agency justified its decision on the grounds of "unusual circumstances" and safety concerns. It said its technicians were investigating the problem, while no timeline for resuming flights had been announced at the time of the Associated Press report. No reliable final tally of cancellations or delays caused by the November 13 halt had been announced.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin described the incident as a communications outage and said there were, at that point, no indications of a "malicious attack against us." That assessment meant authorities were treating the incident as a communications failure while the technical investigation continued. Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said the problem appeared similar to a regional outage in the Northeast in September, but that this time its impact extended nationwide. Arroyo said keeping aircraft on the ground reduces the risk of their taking off and then becoming unreachable during a flight. "The aircraft need to be kept on the ground, not put in the air where we risk being unable to communicate with them," he said.
The nationwide halt follows an earlier communications disruption on September 21, when about 9,500 U.S. flights were delayed or canceled after a communications switch failed and a fiber-optic cable was accidentally cut, according to a Reuters report. The problems were not fully resolved until eight hours later. In that incident, more than 200 flights to and from Philadelphia International Airport were also canceled, according to the Associated Press. In January 2023, a failure in the pilot notification system led to departures being halted nationwide for about two hours. The Government Accountability Office said that failure caused more than 1,300 flights to be canceled and nearly 10,000 others to be delayed during the day; the November halt was the first nationwide one since the 2023 incident, while the previous nationwide halt dated to the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The outages highlight the challenge of maintaining and modernizing air traffic control systems. In a 2023 assessment of Federal Aviation Administration systems, the Government Accountability Office found that 51 of 138 systems were unsustainable and that another 54 were at risk of becoming unsustainable. Congress had approved $12.5 billion for the project the previous year, but Duffy said completing the work would require an additional $30 billion and that the White House had begun pressing Congress to approve it. As part of efforts to modernize airspace management tools, the agency said the "SMART" system combines 200 data streams, including weather information, flight paths, traffic and controller shift indicators. The agency announced on November 10 that it was expanding the system's use to cover the airspace of all 22 centers, and said that since it began operating in September it had helped reroute 180 flights, saving an average of 10 minutes and about 80 gallons of fuel per flight.
The modernization effort also includes replacing old copper communications wires with fiber optics. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said their full replacement is expected by September 2027. That timeline follows the September outage, which was linked to a communications switch failure and a cut fiber-optic cable, and caused widespread flight disruption. The two incidents underscore air traffic safety's reliance on uninterrupted communication channels between controllers and aircraft. In the November incident, the technical investigation was still underway, with no announced timeline for resuming departures in the information reported by the Associated Press.