Duffy Says US Aviation Systems Are Back Online, Seeks $50 Billion for Upgrades
Key Facts
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on November 14 that all Federal Aviation Administration systems had returned to "full operations" after an outage on the evening of Friday, November 13, prompted a nationwide ground stop. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said as many as 5,000 flights would remain canceled on Saturday, while airlines told the agency they expected operations to return to normal by the end of Sunday. FlightAware data cited by Axios showed more than 4,700 flights canceled and more than 13,500 delayed as of 11:50 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday. Bedford said "the worst is behind us," but added that substantial recovery work remained. The two officials said the ground stop was issued as a precaution to protect passengers and flight crews.
The cause of the outage has not yet been determined, according to an Axios report citing Duffy. The secretary said a contractor was carrying out routine maintenance on a communications line, including upgrading a copper wire to fiber-optic cable and installing a new router. But Duffy said the investigation was still determining whether the problem stemmed from contractor error or equipment failure. Bedford said there was no reason to believe a cyberattack or an artificial intelligence issue caused the outage. "We don't see any evidence of anything malicious," he said, without definitively ruling out those possibilities.
Duffy said switches and routers in the legacy system became overloaded with data and then began producing inconsistent data, while the newly deployed equipment did not fail. He said radar and communications data were disrupted at FAA air traffic control centers and terminal radar approach control facilities, known as TRACONs, nationwide. More than 3,500 aircraft were in the air when the ground stop was issued, the secretary said. The nationwide stop lasted five hours before it was lifted Friday evening, according to the Associated Press. These events show that the systems’ return to full operation did not immediately end the disruption’s effects.
Disruptions continued to affect aircraft, passengers and scheduled flights after takeoffs resumed. The Associated Press reported that about 11,000 flights carrying more than 1.5 million passengers were scheduled to depart U.S. airports after 4 p.m. Eastern time on Friday. By 7:05 p.m., 670 flights had returned to their airports of origin and 157 had been diverted to other airports, according to Cirium data cited by the news agency. At least 827 flights were diverted in total. Aviation consultant Andrew Charlton estimated that Friday’s shutdown affected about one-quarter of the 45,000 daily flights in the United States. He said a delay to one aircraft could extend to its subsequent flights, with the impact spreading through the operating schedule.
The outage again drew attention to the aging communications and air traffic control infrastructure in the United States. In a previous disruption in September 2026, sequential failures on two backup communications lines delayed or canceled about 9,500 flights. Bedford said at the time that the aging infrastructure lacked the level of redundancy provided by modern infrastructure. A Reuters report also said the U.S. Government Accountability Office classified 51 of the FAA’s 138 air traffic control systems as unsustainable in 2024, and 54 additional systems as potentially unsustainable. Together, the two categories accounted for more than three-quarters of the systems reviewed by the office. In January 2023, a failure in the system for sending safety notices to pilots halted departures for less than two hours and disrupted more than 10,000 flights. That was the last comparable nationwide ground stop before Friday’s incident.
In the wake of the outage, Duffy raised his request for funding to upgrade air traffic control systems to $50 billion, Axios reported. The FAA received $12.5 billion from Congress in July 2025 to fund upgrades through 2030. The Associated Press reported that Duffy and the White House are also pushing to add $30 billion to complete the work. The agency aims to complete the first phase of its modernization program by December 2028. But the Government Accountability Office warned of delays stemming from weak planning, noting that 11,389 separate project schedules were uncoordinated as of May 2026. Bedford said airlines expected normal operations to return by the end of Sunday, while officials anticipated the system would be ready for the Thanksgiving travel season.