Botched rollout of AI for ATC announced yesterday as rolling out nationwide?
> The agency wrote on Nov. 10 that after the D.C. test, it will “now use SMART in the airspace of all 22 centers across the country to reduce delays, reduce fuel consumption and improve the travel experience for the flying public.” The tech was already being deployed at some airports.
SMART developed by ASI and the FAA is pushing to own a portion of the company:
"The FAA in June awarded Boston-based startup Air Space Intelligence a contract — worth up to $875.9 million — for an AI-powered tool to help air traffic controllers manage the nation’s skies and a related system for an FAA nerve center in northern Virginia to better handle plane congestion. The AI platform’s initial launch in the Washington area has sparked concern among Democrats in Congress who say it should be put on pause until they have a better understanding of how it’s being deployed."
"Over two dozen lawmakers have called on the FAA to pause its 90-day evaluation period for the platform, which began late last month in the Washington region. They say there’s been an “egregious lack of transparency.”"
NYT: "In a social media post on Friday, the company [ASI] said, 'The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.'"
It would be super awesome if I could hop on an airplane without getting my insides x-rayed, my belongs sorted through or damaged, worrying about the windows falling off or the plane's systems flying itself into a crash, or some tech bros' bid to be a billionaire telling what an understaffed ATC controller what to do.
AI tech is nowhere near reliable enough to be introduced in such important systems. I find this deeply troubling even if it’s not related to the current issue.
Except some airports haven't enough free gates for disembarking as planes that wanted to take off were denied. So they tried to go back to their gates. As a result some planes in the air are being diverted to less-busy airports.
However, the National Air Traffic Controllers Union (NATCA) said it has not been “involved in the design, testing, or implementation of SMART and therefore cannot speak to its effect on the air traffic control workforce.”
“NATCA believes any new technology should complement and not replace the experience, training, and professional judgment of air traffic controllers who are responsible for the safety of the National Airspace System,” the union said in a statement.
That seems like pretty important context actually, and is a surprise to me.
Seems like there are three plausible causes right now given the extremely limited communication from the govt.
1. The AI system rolled out yesterday had more access than publicly claimed and managed to break things.
2. The ongoing large scale equipment upgrade went wrong.
3. General incompetence from a department run by an unqualified realty show actor, within an administration that is actively hostile to expertise and experience in the federal workforce.
"SMART is a cloud-based system that centralizes 200 data streams – including weather patterns, flight paths, traffic flow, and controller staffing metrics – into one platform."
I don't see why they would care about the NATCA's evaluation of the system. As a union, they have a vested interest in protecting the employment of traffic flight controller workers more than public safety.
Even assuming they don’t care about public safety at all, their members are still going to have to work with it, and happen to be among the world’s leading experts in air traffic control, weirdly enough.
That system just makes suggestions and isn't actually integrated in any ATC system. This is a telecom issue.
Its more than likely that system is just created by some Trump donor and was purchased by the FAA to launder public funds to some company that Trump owes a favor too. Its not actually integrated with anything.
SMART is a cloud-based system that centralizes 200 data streams – including weather patterns, flight paths, traffic flow, and controller staffing metrics – into one platform.
> That system just makes suggestions and isn't actually integrated in any ATC system. This is a telecom issue.
Is there any evidence for this beyond a single statement from the govt? This administration hasn't exactly developed a reputation for fully accurate and truthful reporting.
The point they’re making is that the public sector is often more efficient at doing X at a lower price.
People talk about competition driving the private sector into total efficiency but when you actually start working in it you start to notice how inefficient they actually do things (and how hard they try to avoid competition).
> In the private sector, we are responsible for our money and that of our investors who are contributing it voluntarily.
So how much is Zuckerberg personally responsible for after wasting what, 90 billion on the stupid metaverse?
> That ain't true of the government, and all that "care" and "budgeting" could just as easily be called administrative overhead and bloat.
So just to be clear; if the government tries to do accounting and budgeting, that’s administrative bloat, and if it doesn’t, that’s wasting money with no accountability?
Not that either scenario describes any part of the government I’ve ever seen I'm just illustrating clearly that you’re operating from the perspective of “the government spending money on anything is always waste” irrespective of what the money is being spent on.
We don't have to care how much money Zuckerberg wastes. Do you lie awake at night wondering how much money I waste?
I've worked on government contracts. Yes, there are piles and piles of administrative overhead heaped onto everything that gets done (with a material budget).
Can we even call what the government runs on these a ... "budget" with "accountability"? LOL
Info on this is amazingly sparse. Apparently Sec. Duffy posted something on X/Twitter, and that's all the news media have.
Looking at LAX departures, it looks like nothing has departed since about 10:30 AM PST, and everything later is showing Delayed or Cancelled. There are times after Delayed, but it's not clear those times mean anything. Some are now in the past.
"flysfo.com" is too overloaded to display departures. Stuck at "loading...".
JFK departure status shows almost solid "Delayed".
Makes sense. CNN reported that international airlines were still departing for North Atlantic flights, apparently because they use a separate communications system.
Yeah, oceanic flights largely use satellite-based CPDLC today, or HF voice as a fallback, but not VOR in any case (which I suspect is the implicated system here).
Sec of Homeland Security gave an interview about 10 minutes ago saying it's indefinite, they don't know the cause, and to expect resolution to take a while.
SFO had delays this morning because of winds. I'm not sure if LA also had bad weather, but SFO had a lot of rain and if you know SFO, you'll encounter a delay if someone sneezes in the direction of the runways.
You need to go outside, take a walk and then have a hot chocolate.
All is well, this is not the AIpocalypse. Just some dude fucking up something stupid, as usual.
Update before I can no longer edit:
> The Federal Aviation Administration told airlines the nationwide outages that prompted the ground stop were the result of a problem with network routers, according to an airline source.
> The problem is believed to have started at Chicago Midway International Airport and cascaded nationwide.
If there was an attack on your country, my phone wouldn’t stop ringing, just like it did 9/11.
All I am getting is pictures of baked cookies right now.
So there is no attack on your country.
Planes are not falling out of the sky, as you can see on publicly available platforms. Nothing is exploding on the ground, besides the poor souls choosing Taco Bell for dinner.
I am confident you will not be abducted or murdered by Aliens today either, pinky promise.
So whatever happens is not an immediate danger to the planes still in the air. And no danger to anyone on the ground.
The most simple explanation is that the communication between ground and air is not working properly, and as this is necessary to safely fly thousands of planes simultaneously, they should rather stay on the ground for safety reasons until they figure out what is wrong.
If you have any specific concerns not addressed above, feel free to share them.
> An update to the private communications network that connects America's air traffic control system caused the system to reboot, leading to a crash and a communications outage, multiple sources told CBS News. The system is operated by L3Harris, which did not immediately respond to CBS News' request for comment.
I did see another statement where Mullin said this doesn't look like a malicious act, which just makes it even more weird that he's sort of taking point. Maybe the Real World actor leading transportation is in over his head?
I'm watching it live on ADSBexhange, here's a flight I picked at random going approximately past me that'll land in Detroit about an hour from now... there's not much left over the US over 40,000 feet. Only 2 planes over Indiana at that altitude right now.
It's eerie seeing the total number of aircraft tracked decrease. I put on a filter for 1000' to 80000', to exclude aircraft on the ground, and the number was around 12K when I started watching. It's down to just over 9.4K now. Wild.
Edit: 22 minutes later and the count is down to 8.4K.
I'm also near Detroit and am watching the trackers and I'm pretty sure I just saw N831AK take off from Troy Oakland in violation of the grounding order. I wonder how common that is.
This tracks with what I has seem elsewhere. I don't have the details handy now, but the communication system used for long range handoffs for flights above 18,000 ft seems to be what is impacted. Keeping planes below that deck would keep them bouncing more frequently between shorter range towers but at least still tracked and in communication.
ATCSCC Advisory
ATCSCC 111 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONAL GROUND STOP
EVENT TIME: 13/2053 - 14/0400
DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY.
ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION
COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING
TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND
INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.
It's a format called "Date-Time Group" (DTG). Used in military, I think it dates back to teletypes, and is better to say over radio than modern ISO formats.
You'd say "Valid from the thirteenth at two zero five three zulu" over radio.
The TLDR is that punchcard operators found the DTG date format convenient. Punchcard sorting is easiest when the consecutive bits encode the sort key, and the DTG format is easy to split into different sets of bit ranges corresponding to common business logic.
Airplane software is some of the oldest on the planet, pre-dating anything that would be considered a best practice. When you see something weird in the space, assume it is because someone in the 1960s thought using more than two characters world be a profligate waste of space.
Unrolling these decisions is a monumental task given the decades of hardware already deployed in the field that will only be upgraded when the current unit fails.
> When you see something weird in the space, assume it is because someone in the 1960s thought using more than two characters world be a profligate waste of space.
And with 1960s technology, this might just have been a very reasonable decision.
Oh nice, very helpful. The sibling thread mentions that this problem is specific to "ARTCCs", which are not the towers at airports but rather central hubs:
Between the sectors administered by [smaller towers] are 20 contiguous areas of US airspace above 18,000 feet, each managed by an Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC)...
A flight is handed off from one Center to another until it descends near its destination, when control is transferred to the TRACON serving the destination, and ultimately to the tower controller serving the airport.
Wikipedia mentions they in particular use special "very high frequency aviation bands" (around "AM 118-137 MHz"), which is presumably why they're all linked together. It also mentions sharing systems, but no clear specifics that I can find. Certainly doesn't disprove the botched rollout theory, tho...
EDIT: someone below posted this, seems relevant -- the 'Radar multiplexer pipeline' that's on a "fast track" and an "aggressive track": https://www.sunhillo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SUN3125-... TL;DR: upgrading radio systems from old analog tech to new digital tech, I think?
That’s obviously not what’s happening. But if this upgrade is really implicated, the real question would be where the line of accepted residual risk for an outage like this was drawn.
Well sure, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if someone greenlit a plan that wasn't supposed to involve closing the airspace, but which failed and which had an insufficiently thought out rollback plan.
Same here, I get it only on some refreshes, otherwise it shows "no advisories". I hope that's not the main path these things are disseminated normally.
I have no idea whether this particular failure was Microsoft's fault, but I was in the air on September 14, 2004 when a substantial portion of the southwestern US's air traffic control went down:
(I was near ORD at the time, flying toward the outage area. We diverted to ORD, and the pilot was very friendly about it.)
At the time I thought it was Microsoft's fault, as Windows 95 and 98 were susceptible to crashing when GetTickCount() overflowed, and this ATC crash was due to a 32-bit millisecond counter on a Windows machine overflowing, but in this particular instance the system was apparently not running on a version of Windows with this particular bug and the failure was just an application error.
If I’m not tasked with solving the problems then is there anything I can do for that is productive? Discussing it at all seems like unproductive rubbernecking.
Huh?
I'm not at work, nobody is picking up my slack.
If you want to deal with your own life, fine, but this is an Internet forum - the only reason it exists is to chat about whatever.
Agreed. I would apply this further; stop letting 1970s and 1980s pop culture fads consume our attention; let go of Star Wars and Marvel etc etc; previous centuries headlines
Let go of software dev; as is a mechanical task from the 60s-70s
"Realistically you want fewer, higher-quality engineers who are educated in these tools and treat them with respect and caution. These tools are dangerous and you can’t play around. All it takes is one mistake and the blast radius is way, way larger. One mistake can do so much damage it undos all value of an entire year. Before downloading a malicious dependency was limited to deterministic behavior and could be scanned for. Now, you run a MCP server locally, it can prompt inject (in many different ways), and now your super powerful AI buddy is hacking you in ways a deterministic piece of malware could never. You could cripple entire companies through negligent use."
And
"And now we are controlling models that can be hacked in so many different ways and literally blow up companies. It used to be accountability the software wouldn’t break. Now it’s accountability that in creating the software we don’t ruin the business."
Not saying this was caused by malicious actors or negligent AI agent usage nor am I saying was the previous Microsoft outage either the above references but it doesn't look great. If our technology is really so brittle, we might be looking at a return to way slower world to put it simply. Maybe no remote work because it gets hacked too easy!
> A computer is a device that enables a person to make more mistakes faster than any previous invention, with the possible exception of the combination of handguns and tequila.
> Transport Secretary Sean Duffy says the FAA "issued a nationwide ground stop for all US airports following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.
Hate that for all involved. Was flying out of ATL when the Crowdstrike clusterfuck imploded Delta's antiquated crew scheduling backends. Not a fun night.
Godspeed for everyone getting to where they need to be, somehow, or at least ending tonight with a roof over your heads.
We were offered $1500 to get on a later flight and I’m so glad I didn’t get to the counter on time to take them up on it. Saw the news reports a half hour before landing.
The flight crew on my LHR-SEA flight "still expects to land in the US." The lack of conviction in that expectation was audible. I don't get the impression that they're being told very much, but maybe that's literally a consequence of the "communication issues."
edit: we're on approach into Seattle, so apparently we were one of the happy cases of the "case-by-case basis."
Secretary of Homeland Security just assured a press conference that all planes in the air will be dealt with on a case by case basis. Some may be prioritised.
I'm seeing some diversions on Flightradar24. E.g. DAL2195 from Tampa to LGA was diverted to Harrisburg. But some flights are continuing to their original destinations.
More info on AP [1]. Looks like a comms issue. The figures they quoted for the overhaul are absolutely insane - almost $45 billion (I used to work in telecom):
> "The government has been working to overhaul the outdated technology that air traffic controllers rely on since Congress approved $12.5 billion for the project last year."
> "Duffy has said that another $30 billion will be needed to complete the work, and the White House has begun lobbying Congress to approve it."
I’ve seen figures that estimate the aviation industry to provide about $1.5 trillion worth of GDP for America, so 4-5 billion dollars. Feel free to double that for the cost of dealing with unexpected disruptions and loss of institutional trust.
It's because air traffic control systems in the US haven't been significantly upgraded in like a century. Keep kicking the can it will get more and more expensive
Wouldn't that have been taken into account when the $12.5 billion was allocated? Or was the $12.5 billion just meant to be the first allocation and they knew substantially more would be need later?
Snark aside, this is actual advice in Crisis Engineering by Nitze, Weaver, and Dickerson, and largely matches my experiences as well. You can harp on and on and on at upper management about why budget or attention needs to be allocated to take care of something before it blows up into a much bigger problem, but they'll never move on it -- until it actually does blow up, and then suddenly you've got nearly a blank check to do whatever's necessary to make sure it never happens again.
If you don't take full advantage of that, you're missing out on possibly your only opportunity ever to fix whatever's needed fixing for years.
When the system is held together with chewing gum and 1980s-era software, when it fails, "someone screws up" is not a fair reaction. Of course it fails! The wonder is that it still mostly works.
A lot of very hardworking people getting too little pay for something so critical while their employers (some contracting company) take a lot of profit. Eventually they burn out waiting for help and a replacement system and retire or quit, then the systems really start failing because the knowledge leaves with them.
I don’t like Lutnick, but insinuating that he knew 9/11 would happen, and only cared to save himself is a baseless conspiracy that doesn’t live up to what HN standards should be
Yep those are the last two. In 2023 it was because of a contractor deleted some file and caused NOTAM to go down, and 2001… well we all know what happened
There were three NORAD exercises (Sky Shield I, II, and III) in 1960, 1961, and 1962 where all civil aviation across the US and Canada were grounded for several hours (the 1961 one was 12 hours, 1960 was 6 hours and 1962 was 5.5 hours). This was with several months of advance notice. These were exercises to test how effective NORAD would be at engaging Soviet bombers. While they publicly announced that they were 99% effective, in actual fact no more than a quarter of the bombers were even engaged before they reached their target. This evaluation was not declassified until the 1990s.
After 1962 there was too much air travel to continue to shut it down for exercises, and NORAD switched to smaller, regional level things that did not shut down air travel after that. But the results of Sky Shield III in 1962 were the only experience that the FAA had to work from when they did the full ground stop after September 11th. Sky Shield III had tested how quickly air traffic control could clear the sky in the event of a nuclear war- the USAF had put up several hundred T-33 trainers, flying them randomly around the US and Canada, and then at a certain point in the exercise the ATC had to get them all on the ground far away from major metropolitan centers (presumed lost in the war).
I wonder if this will close the Starship launch window starting at 5:45pm EST. The FAA issued the commercial launch license earlier today. That launch is under a separate set of "commercial space rules", but presumably they need to coordinate with air traffic control.
I mean they should already be in a situation where no planes are scheduled to fly there, and now there will be even less planes. So seems like an ok situation for them.
I guess if some plane needs to do an emergency detour threw threw that space, but that seems unlikely.
They use third party telecom providers to relay communications between ATC “centers” and remote radio transmitters. It is not purely AM radio and outages have occurred in the past, most recently in September.
"modern" -> "we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."
> "modern" -> "we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."
"we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline, now with software containing a near-infinite amount of lines of code generated by LLMs, to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."
There isn't really one. This is a system that's supposed to have it's own built in redundancy and must not go down.
Flight Service uses a different set of radios and can relay messages to ATC, but they've been slowly dismantled over the last two decades and wouldn't have the capacity to step in for an outage (nor should they be expected to - that's not their purpose).
Some aircraft have CPDLC for text-based communication, but it's asynchronous and you can't use that as a replacement for voice communication in the terminal environment. Also, many aircraft aren't equipped to receive it.
Pilots are trained on lost comms procedures, so if you're in the air and the radio fails they'd fall back to those regulations. Basically all the aircraft would fly their last assigned clearance, and attempt to deconflict manually with other aircraft over air-to-air radio (similar to flying into an untowered airport).
I would bet the problem is not strictly the radios themselves, they will still work, Planes can talk to each other and directly to airports, But that there is a large scale highly integrated control center network that failed, and planes can no longer talk to centralized traffic control.
So it falls back to local control, more in the style of visual flight rules. Pilots in existing flights will have to be vigilant and do their own deconflictation and new flights are banned out until the network is back up.
All conjecture at this stage of course, but all the radios won't just fail. It is probably going to be a poster child example about the dangers of large scale integration. The attraction of course is that integration is very efficient, the danger is it tends to fail all at once instead of in smaller pieces.
Technically, you do not need radios. There are many many uncontrolled airports in the United States, where you can technically fly around without establishing two-way radio communication. It’s doable, but I don’t know if that’s even a scenario pilots test in the simulator during their semiannual trainings.
Most air traffic is IFR. You definitely need radio for IFR traffic in for deconfliction in most of the world. (There's a few exceptions in very remote places, but that's mostly academic.) Even legacy procedural (non-radar) separation assumes you have working radio, and a radio failure is an emergency.
VFR traffic doesn't necessarily need radio, and is not affected by this groundstop.
You don’t need radio for IFR (as the whole point of a flight plan is that if you lose contact you continue to fly your plan). But you kind of do need radar.
Right, but isn't a lot of that necessary radio aircraft-to-aircraft, like ADS-B? Obviously not ideal, but I thought IFR traffic could feasibly maintain separation without ATC help.
AM Radios are literally everywhere, and very commonly available.
I would hope that airports keep a battery operated radio + antenna in case of emergency with them, to at least communicate with aircraft within visual range of the airport.
@nxobject I meant litterally. The ATC system is derived from the IBM 9020 which was itself a set of interconnected System 360 systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_9020
That's a little unfair to IBM – sure, you're just as beholden to them for life, but at least the service engineer gets to your rack before you know something's gone wrong!
That explains the outage. We're just in one of the 5 days of the year they don't cover...
I did a tour of Adelaide airport with Engineers Australia in the 1990s. We visited their obsolete IBM main frame, still running ATC in their computer room. They were tied to it by the certification of the software it was running. Just as you described.
I'm wondering if this is another case of delayed Y2K, where the system suddenly thinks the century part is 19 instead of 20 for a two digit year of 26.
This message was pulled from a ATC communications system ordering the stop. These are terse direct communications for professionals who don't need or have time to read the story of what's going on. The news, not having any initial sources besides this is just reporting it, at the time they had no more information.
Like if you're ordering a pizza they don't need the story of your day, why you chose pepperoni, or what movie you plan to watch. Somebody else might be interested, but not the pizza guy.
I do not really understand what the FAA means by “inbound international flights will be managed on a case by case basis.”
I am watching planes stacked up on final approach to land at KBOS as I type. From flight radar 24 they are a mix of foreign and domestic. So incoming flights are clearly being managed here.
Does this imply some potential risk from inbound international air traffic? Or maybe the FAA meant outbound? Something else I am missing?
I suspect they mean that inbound flights from international airports may still take off (probably in part because the FAA can't _really_ stop them, in part because the volumes are much lower and thus more manageable, and in part because one might hope that by the time it takes to get to the US from many international destination, the incident will be resolved).
Very unlikely that any international flights bound for the USA are taking off. Probably many are turning around or diverting if they are not more than halfway there.
I'm not following this very closely, but I've not seen any reports of diversions for domestic flights, so I think it'd be unlikely for international flights. The report is just for a ground stop, which is just a stop in departures; normally a ground stop would allow flights already in the air to travel to their normal destination.
That reasoning doesn't really make sense. A flight from outside the US that is inbound could divert to a non-US airport that isn't impacted by whatever is going on, depending on where they are and what their fuel status is. A domestic flight doesn't have a non-US airport to divert to.
(Sure, a flight near the Canadian or Mexican border could in theory divert to a Canadian or Mexican airport, but it's unlikely many people on those flights have their passports with them.)
Ah, my point was more that if the action being taken isn't "get planes on the ground _now_" and so the US airspace remains open for traffic already in the air, then it's unlikely they're trying to get international planes to either divert or return.
> (Sure, a flight near the Canadian or Mexican border could in theory divert to a Canadian or Mexican airport, but it's unlikely many people on those flights have their passports with them.)
There must be some procedures in place for this - I pretty regularly take domestic (Canadian) flights that pass over the US where I don't carry my passport.
A domestic US flight can still divert to Canada. There usually are special arrangements that allow people on a diverted flight to stay short-term while the situation is resolved, even if they don't have the required documents or visas.
That is interesting and why i was wondering if they meant outbound flights but screwed up the language. I had assumed (probably wrongly) operators who should be risk averse would not want their US bound flights taking off under these conditions.
Not in the industry, but I think ground stops might actually not be a regular/automated procedural thing for inbound international flights in the way that they are for domestic flights.
As for asking already airborne flights to turn around, those coming in over the ocean might simply not have a non-US alternate airport available with their fuel remaining, so that's often not an option.
Yes, but most of them are not viable in the late stages of a flight. Planes aren't carrying enough fuel to cross an ocean for a second time; most don't even have the capacity.
The diversion airports are chosen specifically for each stage of the flight, so a flight doesn't ever need to return to where it came from.
Oceanic flights are planned so that at every point along the route, the aircraft can lose an engine or cabin pressure and still reach a pre-approved diversion airport with enough fuel, with the flight plan marking the points where turning back versus continuing becomes the faster option. If a diversion is needed mid-ocean, the crew offsets from their assigned track and altitude to stay clear of other traffic, then heads to the nearest suitable airport, such as Gander, Keflavik or Shannon over the Atlantic, or Anchorage, Cold Bay or Midway over the Pacific.
Please suggest an appropriate international alternate for a plane just about to land in Denver with an hour of fuel remaining.
Alternate airports are picked based with regards to all kinds of contingencies (many of them meteorological), but "the US closes literally every airport" is not one of them.
Doesn't seem like it; I've seen several international flights land in JFK alone since this started. (On the other hand, these might simply not have enough fuel left to divert to any non-US airport.)
Maybe they mean inbound international flights may be allowed to take off from their origin, on a case by case basis. Usually a clearance is required to take off from both the origin and destination.
Presumably it means they may allow some international flights to the US to depart if they expect the issue to be resolved by the time they are in US airspace.
I think it's more mundane than that, I assume they mean that certain international flights will be turned around or redirected while others will complete their route. Say a flight just an hour underway London to New York might be turned around while one nearly at its destination may be allowed to land.
Depending on the nature of the disruption it may be they simply have drastically reduced capacity to handle traffic so landings may be much slower and they'll manage the traffic based on various priorities.
Probably just means that if you're less than halfway across the Atlantic, you can turn around and go back to Europe. I really wouldn't suggest reading too much into the phrasing.
> The FAA has reassured the public and airlines that SMART only suggests routes and doesn't affect air safety.
> [The] FAA also says a D.C.-based team of experts validates findings before they’re ever passed on to air traffic control, and the controllers retain the final decision on whether to accept SMART’s suggestions.
Depends if an AI DoSed an important service or not.
There used to be a lot of invisible gatekeepers in a pre-AI world. At work, everyone can ask their agent to query SQL on databases that they were supposed to use through an application. The application and the security by obscurity(end users didn't know how to connect to the DB nor did they know SQL) were the gate keepers.
Doubtful. That tool likely suggests "improved" clearances, which a controller can use at their discretion. It likely does not control clearances directly.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
While I don't have insider knowledge of this particular deployment, there was a strong industry-wide push towards "ship unreviewed AI generated code and hope for the best", partly driven by the fact that AI writes code faster than humans have bandwidth to properly review.
Under the hypothesis that some under-reviewed AI generated code made it into prod, the situation could be qualified as "engineers are panicking, because they don't know if they are the cause or not"
My wife is on a plane on the ground at ORD (they just landed) and they have been told they can use the restrooms but can't get off the planes. Any reason why folks wouldn't be allowed to deplane at the end of the journey if it was a radar or comms issue? They can pull up to the gate using flags . . .
This seems like one of those efficiency-vs-resilience problems. Sure, it's "more efficient" (in cost) to use the same empty/fill process for every plane, but when nobody can leave, some extra capacity to unload planes would help.
You don't have to go to a gate to deplane and this is an extremely rare event. They'll just pull up a staircase and have them deplane to a shuttle eventually.
We are 6th in line waiting for a gate while they tow grounded planes off of the gates. Normally those flights would have departed and we would get a gate fairly quickly, but if no one is taking off, then they need to move them, and potentially deplane the (angry) departing passengers.
The only time I've spent long stretches on a grounded plane have been at ORD. It's such a busy airport than any disruption to the schedule just causes all sorts of chaos.
> In a notice posted on its website, the agency said technicians are working to resolve the disruption as quickly as possible.
This article is very likely misreporting the US National Weather Service radar outage page you can find people reposting elsewhere in this comment section. The NWS page has been updated to say it does not reflect a current issue. Anecdotally, my local NWS weather radar is working fine. Also, weather doppler radar and ATC "radar" are very, very different technologies.
>The US National Weather Service said on Friday it was experiencing nationwide internet and communications problems that could prevent users from accessing products on its websites or cause outdated information to be displayed. Technicians were working to resolve the problems as soon as possible, the NWS said in a statement.
My wife's plane was about to take off (moving) but then stopped. I just messaged her to check once I saw the news. Sounds like the people onboard weren't given any info as to why. They're still on the runway waiting.
Physics says all planes land. I guess eventfully would be diversion (maybe to Canada lol) or Mayday Fuel (but you probably won't know it happened anyway - it just means some reserve fuel will be used).
ATCSCC ADVZY 117 DCC 11/13/2026 ALL CENTERS EXTENDED FLIGHT PLAN DROP TIMES IMPLEMENTED
MESSAGE:
EVENT TIME: 13/2120 - 14/0500
CONSTRAINED FACILITIES: ZTL
DCC HAS IMPLEMENTED EXTENDED FLIGHT PLAN DROP TIMES TO 240 MINUTES
FOR ALL ENROUTE CENTERS DUE TO NATIONWIDE COMMS FAILURE.
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132121-140530
SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 21:21
ATCSCC ADVZY 120 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONWIDE GROUND STOP
MESSAGE:
EVENT TIME: 13/2245 - 14/0400
DESTINATION AIRPORT:ALL
FACILITIES INCLUDED: ALL
EXPECT UPDATE:0400Z
REASON: COMMUNICATIONS FAILURE
REMARKS: THE FAA COMMAND CENTER GROUND STOP REMAINS IN EFFECT. AS
ENROUTE FACILITIES RECOVER, FLIGHTS WILL BE ALLOWED TO DEPART
THROUGH COORDINATION WITH THE AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEM COMMAND
CENTER.
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132246-140430
SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 22:46
It means that flight plans (which include departure time) will stay in the system longer after the departure times are missed, so that IFR flight plans will not need to be re-filed. In other words, flight plans have a longer TTL.
This will ease the pain of getting things moving again, assuming they fix it by the time the 4hr window passes.
You can definitely file a flight plan later than that. 30 minutes before departure is the recommended filing time (per AIM 5-1-6), but you can even file for an immediate departure. It's just that at less then 30 minutes additional delay is possible, depending on backend handling and human processing. But in most cases the strip will print within a minute or two of submitting the flight plan.
But also, this is about when the flight plans expire out of the system if they're not activated for departure - so it's saying unused flight plans won't be deleted for 4 hours, so pilots won't have to refile for departure.
Most of these systems started out as teletype printers, back in the day. The teletype systems only had an all-caps character set.
Aviation is global, and we still need to interop with countries and airports that still use actual teletype. So the legacy protocols still remain, even though much of it is tunneled over IP links now.
Also: The keyboards used in both airplanes and in ATC facilities are often special reduced-footprint keyboards without shift/caps keys. (They're also often ABC layout rather than QWERTY.) So there's that, too.
We are experiencing technical difficulties. We apologize for the inconvenience but please check back soon, as we are working to have the issues resolved.
dumb question but do the airport gates get "too full" if all plans are grounded? Do airports sort of expect some constant turnover to have enough open gates to service everything? Do you end up with a line of plans waiting for a gate?
Very, very much yes. Most busy airports will start having problems with gate capacity due to just normal delays. We definitely don't have the capacity to have every active flight in the country parked at a gate.
Based on my current experience on the ground at AUS, yes.
Gates were quickly full, ground ops to pull empty planes off gates takes quite a while, and about 90 mins later, we are pulling into our scheduled gate.
They don't spend a dollar more than they need to so extra gates for this would be quite the luxury. I guess what they need though is apron space or hangar space for the extra planes and the number of gates won't matter so much.
Maybe just paranoia but it seems slightly suspicious for this to happen while we are in the middle of discussing massive funding and overhauls to the air traffic control systems. This will certainly end up pushing a lot more funding into these programs and companies now that were trying to sell more expensive systems.
I guess we will see what happened in the aftermath. But I very much doubt the current problem has anything to do with a lack of funding.
And I don't see anyone arguing about overall funding, only arguing about who to throw millions or billions of additional dollars at chasing vague ideas of how to improve things based on what politicians and C-suites, who have no experience in the area, claim they can do. To me it looks more like grifting for contracts and kickbacks than any well thought out plans to improve things.
If a lot of planes on the ground were prohibited from taking off, but couldn't get back to their gates due to congestion/traffic, where will the planes go that are still in the air and ultimately land? Just disembark passengers out on the tarmac? (hopefully with some sort of bus pickup)
About 15 mins ago I got off BART at Daly City and a plane took off from SFO and flew overhead. Didn't look like anything special, just a regular passenger jet to me.
EVENT TIME: 13/2100 - 14/0300
USERS CAN EXPECT AIRBORNE HOLDING TO ANY AND ALL AIRPORTS WITHIN THE
NAS DUE EQUIPTMENT OUTAGES. UPDATES WILL BE ISSUED AS ADITIONAL
INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.
EFFECTIVE TIME:
132120-140330
SIGNATURE:
26/11/13 21:20
Edit: end date of tomorrow??? Is that just temporary?
It seems that the adv/ pages are not loading any advisories, though I am just guessing and have no idea how this is meant to work. The fact that the search page has a date input would seem to imply historical advisories should be shown. If you go to https://nasstatus.faa.gov/ and click the Advisory links for any of the active events that have one, they all show as blank too. Could be totally wrong though.
This happened to me a few minutes ago. I clicked that link, it said "no advisory", I was making the same comment you made, then tried refreshing and the advisory came back.
Insane. It looks like they are showing no advisory on first page view, then advisory? Can others confirm?
Listening to SFO Tower, the latest info I’ve heard is an expected stop until 04:00 UTC, but flights departing to Asia via west departure may be permitted to depart.
I've read scattered reports of other flights also taking off from the east coast.
If the communications issue is between US ATC regions, this makes sense. The planes are being handed off to other non-US ATCs where there is no communications issue.
What does this mean outside of the US, I.e. I suspect planes that should be in places abroad won't be so ongoing cancellations and crew in wrong places etc.
Is conjecture allowed? I have no evidence of this, but I've noticed that often before big meetings between superpowers one side or the other seems to do a minor or subtle attack as a kind of sabre-rattling/warning to the other side to try to gain leverage (and show them they're not to be trifled with). So with that, I wonder if this is a China/NVIDIA accusation connection.
It is hard to not rapidly spiral into pure conspiracy theory territory, but one has to ask how many "black swan" events can you accept within a period of a few days before you start to question things?
A sequence of events:
- Democrats win congress : it sets a clock to act before January
- Jensen is taken out, throwing nVidia into chaos
- Email comms are blacked out for an entire day across government and major enterprises
- Air traffic is stopped nation wide the next day
That tool was first unveiled for the Washington, D.C., area airports two months ago, on a day when problems with air traffic communications failures also grounded hundreds of flights, after a circuit failed and it was discovered that contractors had accidentally ripped through a fiber line that was supposed to serve as its backup.
I was actually expecting it to be from the Microsoft 365 outage. Non technical people have a bad habit of inserting email as a critical step in a process.
It's actually quite impressive, you have to really try to be so bad at your job of building redundant systems that some failure mode implausibly affects everything nation wide, yet allows Canadian domestic flights to proceed fine.
Did the Starship launch today just ground all flights in the USA? Maybe, maybe not. I am convinced it did. If Elon Musk can take a shred of evidence, or just make shit up, and change domestic and foreign policy, then why can't I?
We obviously live in a simulation after all, what does it matter?
Maybe the simulation overlords programmed us to put a buggy NOTAM out, which is what apparently happened in 2023, but now it was supposed to be fixed thanks to all this efficiency!? NOTAMs usually go out beforehand. You know, as a notice.
Again, who knows. We can barely make enough Cybertrucks according to demand, the simulation overlords are busy.
ATCSCC Advisory
ATCSCC 111 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONAL GROUND STOP
MESSAGE:
EVENT TIME: 13/2053 - 14/0400
DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY.
ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION
COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING
TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND
INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132054 - 140430
SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 20:54
Due to "rolling frequency outtage" [sic]: From a claimed photo of FAA documents (I replaced the all caps with lowercase):
"... ground stop is in effect for all destinations until further notice due to rolling frequency outtage in multiple centers..."
and
"... the ground stop is now a nationwide ground stop for all centers, all destinations until further notice due to widespread frequency outtages.. ..."
(EDIT: @mods / @dang: Around January this year (iirc) somehow my account ended up rate-limited, posts relatively demoted (start low, drop quickly), vouches/flags relatively ineffective, etc. Usually I don't care too much and haven't bothered to do anything about it but it is sometimes annoying - it limits participation - and right now it buries some of the more valuable information in the discussion. Could you look into fixing it? I don't know of a reason this account would be penalized. Thanks.)
>The FAA has issued a nationwide departure ground stop “due to several impacts to ATC Frequencies and/or Radar capabilities,” the Air Current reported, referring to air traffic control systems. The FAA command center said it does not have further information on the “timing or cause of this outage,” the publication said.
"Today's event is therefore generally being described as the third nationwide grounding event since September 11, 2001, counting 9/11 itself. The three incidents differ significantly in cause and scope."
Doubtful. That tool likely suggests "improved" clearances, which a controller can use at their discretion. It likely does not control clearances directly.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
>I can't believe people actually think outlook being down would take down all departures across the US
Because American infrastructure is modern, well designed, maintained and funded? Because government is competent and rational? I could absolutely believe that would happen.
If true and this ends up lasting an hour or more, that's going to be undeniably, objectively hilarious. At least they used to keep the planes running on time!
--- EDIT:
This could just be the first issue that's arisen -- the FAA announced it "is expanding across the nation" on Tuesday. Which could really mean anything.
The Ars Technica article behind the Gizmodo one sadly doesn't have more info, either.
It'd be kind of absurd if a read-only integration took down nationwide infrastructure, but A) we've all been there... and B) the gizmodo article does mention they're also trying to phase out floppy disks for some jobs still, which tells me their CI/CD and rollback hygiene might not be top-notch. Hopefully the Real World contestant in charge of our transportation network is on site with a ClaudeCode terminal as we speak!
It does sound pretty deeply integrated, I will say:
SMART is a cloud-based system that centralizes 200 data streams – including weather patterns, flight paths, traffic flow, and controller staffing metrics – into one platform.
The fact sheet has two more vaguely worrying bullet points -- I would say such wild speculation is unwarranted, but I struggle to think what else could cause all the radios in the nation to go down at once... Emphasis mine:
Creates **a single shared real-time picture** of schedules, weather, airport capacity, and airspace conditions.
...
Enhances the effectiveness of **existing** FAA air traffic management systems.
Oh boy, that feels plausible. Some of these legacy systems are pretty fragile and aren't designed to be queried heavily outside of well established patterns.
I could see AI deploying something that just obliterates those systems with requests.
If so we are really speedrunning into idiocracy with AI.
Is this going to end up being the work of rogue Anthropic or OpenAI agents that “unexpectedly” escaped so they can regulate open weight models under the guise of preventing them from doing the same thing 6 months from now?
US-bound flight from YYZ. They shut down #2 engine and parked us in inactive runway. Pilot came on and said he was reading something about "ATC radio frequency issue" but has been told by United ops that it'll be cleared in ~30 min from now.
Verizon Wireless is out here as well ("SOS"—thankfully my UA flight has Starlink).
Last time this happened in July it was due to some network handoff issue so maybe there is some fiber cut somewhere? (My friend said last time it was NE corridor Verizon fiber cut.)
Any three of those pessimistic scenarios seem plausible though. Frightening. Intentional hack/exploit of air traffic control systems is the first thing that came to my mind when I first saw the news.
There was a time when we'd get clear and honest communication about this but now our admin is Baghdad Bobs all the way down. They will lie about it, even if there is no rational reason to lie about it, because this admin and the movement associated with it wants you eternally guessing what the truth is.
There's enough space, but not enough gates. If they think the stop may end in a reasonable time some planes will be pulling away from their gates even without a departure time to make room for the landing planes (or rather, they will have missed their departure time and not have a new one). Landing planes will be able to disembark, and probably won't be boarded again until it's resolved and enough departing traffic has cleared that it's obvious that those flights won't be canceled for today as well.
The boarded and grounded planes may start disembarking passengers at some point, especially if their crews are hitting their maximum time before mandatory rest. These delays will probably prevent replacement crews from arriving.
Yes, and they'll probably do that at some point if they can't get them to the gates. Again, it'll depend on how long this lasts. They will also have to get in more crews to support that since this is not normal and not something they would have planned on in their staffing schedules for a Friday afternoon/evening.
Fox News says that Markwayne Mullin says that the FAA says that it's not a cyberattack, and it's not something like 911. Just heard that, don't have a page to point to at the moment...
If tomorrow there is third major outage of an important infra-structure level service, maybe I will start to get a little conspiratorial about cyberattacks and such.
I know we're all having fun in the comments. But please think about this next time you vote, local/county/state/national. There are people in charge who are not funding upgrading these systems, because their constituents don't want their taxes raised to pay for it. That lack of funding is annoying to some, has an enormous economic impact to many, and is now risking tens of thousands of lives who are literally up in the air. There are planes carrying body parts destined for transplant that are grounded. People who need to get home to their families. All because nobody wanted to pay for what we knew we needed to fix.
One thing to add is that this is bipartisan: both parties have failed to adequately fund ATC updates, and it sometimes feels like there's more interest in vanity projects than fundamental infrastructure funding and solving personnel shortages (ATC is a very difficult career, and the pay, benefits and prestige are not incredible. Fewer and fewer people are choosing to go into this very critical line of work).
No, please stop engaging in baseless and pointless speculation. If the US wants to bomb Iran it doesn’t need more reasoning than it has already used to already do what it has done.
No they don’t - popularity isn’t all that relevant. The president can just order strikes tomorrow.
Besides popularity isn’t the determination of whether something is a good idea or not. The Korean War for example was very unpopular yet it was the right and smart thing to do.
We paid more than $800MM for "route suggestions", btw, a problem that doesn't seem to benefit at all from "AI"—a term reserved for fantastical algorithms. Surely you could solve this with traditional search algorithms without sacrificing your dignity!
Company that created the tool (called Airspace Intelligence) is interesting in terms of demographics for these types of companies - implies lots if the tool 'does not work as designed' (which it will obviously not)
Doubtful. That tool likely suggests "improved" clearances, which a controller can use at their discretion. It likely does not control clearances directly.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
A team of FAA specialists in the SMART center in Washington, D.C., analyzes and validates the SMART data and provides scheduling recommendations to the agency’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Warrenton, VA. The Command Center then routes these recommendations to air traffic control facilities for local leadership to consider.
Of course, these may be the ATC analog of claude code approvals, or they may be overstating the level of human oversight/HIL - but the overall situation seems likely more serious/unclear than something like this. I'm not sure I'd call vibe air traffic control going haywire an "extraordinary" circumstance, though certainly extraordinarily stupid.
I wonder if it was Claude or ChatGPT? My money would be on the latter. Anthropic seems to generally have better security and guardrails, and apparently OpenAI’s newest cyber model is extremely capable.
No, and when Netflix goes down it's not a false flag due to their fear of people running their own Plex servers. Perhaps you just have anxiety about losing something you depend on, so you're projecting.
This week alone, I've seen multiple servers fail due to hardware issues: multiple bad fans, a failed hard drive, bad network optics. Another server got bumped while an adjacent server was being worked on and lost time sync, leading to software instability/crashes. We don't have a large fleet, but we do have more servers than employees, and issues add up. We don't need any help with instability, entropy has us covered, thank you very much.
The nifty thing about stories is that they don't have to be about something directly to trigger strong feelings in your crowd or listeners.
When we are dealing with the FCC, grounding all flights and radio failures in open bands, you can drive a lot of changes.
There are a lot of pesky ESP32s out there, right? Did your company choose to go with the Espressif platform? You know, the hackable SDR one that crashes planes and clubs baby seals and tries to sell your grandparents bad financial scams?
And that is how feelings turn into rumors, which turn into "facts", through a game of telephone in which each next person wants a pat on the back for having their finger on the pulse, for wishing to be perceived as a thought leader.
And then "journalists" "feel" like they have to report on things because as long as they say they're reporting that "someone else had a feeling" they're not technically wrong, and they have bosses breathing down their necks to make the business work, to grow their monetizable audience.
And then no one knows what's true anymore, because we chose to be entertained instead of choosing to be informed.
> The agency wrote on Nov. 10 that after the D.C. test, it will “now use SMART in the airspace of all 22 centers across the country to reduce delays, reduce fuel consumption and improve the travel experience for the flying public.” The tech was already being deployed at some airports.
https://gizmodo.com/the-faa-is-rolling-out-its-ai-air-traffi...
"The FAA in June awarded Boston-based startup Air Space Intelligence a contract — worth up to $875.9 million — for an AI-powered tool to help air traffic controllers manage the nation’s skies and a related system for an FAA nerve center in northern Virginia to better handle plane congestion. The AI platform’s initial launch in the Washington area has sparked concern among Democrats in Congress who say it should be put on pause until they have a better understanding of how it’s being deployed."
"Over two dozen lawmakers have called on the FAA to pause its 90-day evaluation period for the platform, which began late last month in the Washington region. They say there’s been an “egregious lack of transparency.”"
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/15/faa-stake-ai-compan...
Feels like somebody was pushing their preferred company for a government contract and now is push for the government to invest.
Is this more common than I realize in US executive deparyments and agencies?
> The FAA has reassured the public and airlines that SMART only suggests routes and doesn't affect air safety.
That's just a scenario off the top of my head, it could be a lot of stuff. Plugging something new into an old, complicated system isn't risk free.
The destructive & arrogant behaviors won't be reigned in properly if we all fail to recognize that, just FTR.
“NATCA believes any new technology should complement and not replace the experience, training, and professional judgment of air traffic controllers who are responsible for the safety of the National Airspace System,” the union said in a statement.
Seems like there are three plausible causes right now given the extremely limited communication from the govt.
1. The AI system rolled out yesterday had more access than publicly claimed and managed to break things.
2. The ongoing large scale equipment upgrade went wrong.
3. General incompetence from a department run by an unqualified realty show actor, within an administration that is actively hostile to expertise and experience in the federal workforce.
What could go wrong really...
Its more than likely that system is just created by some Trump donor and was purchased by the FAA to launder public funds to some company that Trump owes a favor too. Its not actually integrated with anything.
yeah... sounds about right.
Is there any evidence for this beyond a single statement from the govt? This administration hasn't exactly developed a reputation for fully accurate and truthful reporting.
People talk about competition driving the private sector into total efficiency but when you actually start working in it you start to notice how inefficient they actually do things (and how hard they try to avoid competition).
So how much is Zuckerberg personally responsible for after wasting what, 90 billion on the stupid metaverse?
> That ain't true of the government, and all that "care" and "budgeting" could just as easily be called administrative overhead and bloat.
So just to be clear; if the government tries to do accounting and budgeting, that’s administrative bloat, and if it doesn’t, that’s wasting money with no accountability?
Not that either scenario describes any part of the government I’ve ever seen I'm just illustrating clearly that you’re operating from the perspective of “the government spending money on anything is always waste” irrespective of what the money is being spent on.
I've worked on government contracts. Yes, there are piles and piles of administrative overhead heaped onto everything that gets done (with a material budget).
Can we even call what the government runs on these a ... "budget" with "accountability"? LOL
Botched rollout of AI for ATC ...
or
Rollout of botched AI for ATC.
It sure didn't that long after every dev on earth started using LLMs for everything to turn to shit, so one may wonder...
Looking at LAX departures, it looks like nothing has departed since about 10:30 AM PST, and everything later is showing Delayed or Cancelled. There are times after Delayed, but it's not clear those times mean anything. Some are now in the past.
"flysfo.com" is too overloaded to display departures. Stuck at "loading...".
JFK departure status shows almost solid "Delayed".
No good explanations anywhere.
flights departing hawaii and alaska are also allowed
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50491511
Economy taking a lot of crazy hits this week. They're footgun hits too, not even enemy action.
Edit: ok so one of them was maybe a little bit enemy action.
Probably someone prompted an agent: solve global CO2 emissions :-)
5 days from now? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50465829
Maybe look further than Twitter.
The legitimate media from the New York Times to CNN and beyond all showed video of Markwayne Mullin's news conference 20 minutes before your post.
All is well, this is not the AIpocalypse. Just some dude fucking up something stupid, as usual.
Update before I can no longer edit:
> The Federal Aviation Administration told airlines the nationwide outages that prompted the ground stop were the result of a problem with network routers, according to an airline source.
> The problem is believed to have started at Chicago Midway International Airport and cascaded nationwide.
If there was an attack on your country, my phone wouldn’t stop ringing, just like it did 9/11.
All I am getting is pictures of baked cookies right now. So there is no attack on your country.
Planes are not falling out of the sky, as you can see on publicly available platforms. Nothing is exploding on the ground, besides the poor souls choosing Taco Bell for dinner.
I am confident you will not be abducted or murdered by Aliens today either, pinky promise.
So whatever happens is not an immediate danger to the planes still in the air. And no danger to anyone on the ground.
The most simple explanation is that the communication between ground and air is not working properly, and as this is necessary to safely fly thousands of planes simultaneously, they should rather stay on the ground for safety reasons until they figure out what is wrong.
If you have any specific concerns not addressed above, feel free to share them.
> “This isn’t going to just be be resolved and turned around within the hour"
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-natio...
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a519b8
It's Delta Airlines flight 1070
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL1070
Edit: It landed safely. Continuing to watch our airspace clear out, most traffic at 40,000+ feet is inbound international flights
It's eerie seeing the total number of aircraft tracked decrease. I put on a filter for 1000' to 80000', to exclude aircraft on the ground, and the number was around 12K when I started watching. It's down to just over 9.4K now. Wild.
Edit: 22 minutes later and the count is down to 8.4K.
edit: https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=1...
13/2053
?
You'd say "Valid from the thirteenth at two zero five three zulu" over radio.
Unrolling these decisions is a monumental task given the decades of hardware already deployed in the field that will only be upgraded when the current unit fails.
And with 1960s technology, this might just have been a very reasonable decision.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/s/HUT3wjABQ6
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_control_center
EDIT: someone below posted this, seems relevant -- the 'Radar multiplexer pipeline' that's on a "fast track" and an "aggressive track": https://www.sunhillo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SUN3125-... TL;DR: upgrading radio systems from old analog tech to new digital tech, I think?
VZW and AT&T are moving full tilt in shutting down landline central offices.
Literally the gay dude from Airplane pulling the plug from the socket may have happened here.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/lost-radio-contact-leaves-pilots-o...
(I was near ORD at the time, flying toward the outage area. We diverted to ORD, and the pilot was very friendly about it.)
At the time I thought it was Microsoft's fault, as Windows 95 and 98 were susceptible to crashing when GetTickCount() overflowed, and this ATC crash was due to a 32-bit millisecond counter on a Windows machine overflowing, but in this particular instance the system was apparently not running on a version of Windows with this particular bug and the failure was just an application error.
Aren't computers great? :)
I remember hearing of a fighter a long time ago whose autopilot flipped out when it crossed the equator, due to sin(latitude) becoming negative.
Let go of software dev; as is a mechanical task from the 60s-70s
Cultural memory begets cultural conservatism
This is why there's such an issue with holding power to account nowadays.
To really fuck up, you need a computer.
"Realistically you want fewer, higher-quality engineers who are educated in these tools and treat them with respect and caution. These tools are dangerous and you can’t play around. All it takes is one mistake and the blast radius is way, way larger. One mistake can do so much damage it undos all value of an entire year. Before downloading a malicious dependency was limited to deterministic behavior and could be scanned for. Now, you run a MCP server locally, it can prompt inject (in many different ways), and now your super powerful AI buddy is hacking you in ways a deterministic piece of malware could never. You could cripple entire companies through negligent use." And "And now we are controlling models that can be hacked in so many different ways and literally blow up companies. It used to be accountability the software wouldn’t break. Now it’s accountability that in creating the software we don’t ruin the business."
Not saying this was caused by malicious actors or negligent AI agent usage nor am I saying was the previous Microsoft outage either the above references but it doesn't look great. If our technology is really so brittle, we might be looking at a return to way slower world to put it simply. Maybe no remote work because it gets hacked too easy!
-- some clever person whose name I do not know
> Transport Secretary Sean Duffy says the FAA "issued a nationwide ground stop for all US airports following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.
Godspeed for everyone getting to where they need to be, somehow, or at least ending tonight with a roof over your heads.
edit: we're on approach into Seattle, so apparently we were one of the happy cases of the "case-by-case basis."
Most airliners over the ocean also have inmarsat satphones for the pilots.
> "The government has been working to overhaul the outdated technology that air traffic controllers rely on since Congress approved $12.5 billion for the project last year."
> "Duffy has said that another $30 billion will be needed to complete the work, and the White House has begun lobbying Congress to approve it."
[1] https://apnews.com/article/flights-halted-airports-faa-f81b0...
If you don't take full advantage of that, you're missing out on possibly your only opportunity ever to fix whatever's needed fixing for years.
The FAA et al. have been working to modernize US ATC since ~2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transporta...
The next step is a ton of hardware upgrading, which always costs real money.
I was working on upgrading US ATC in 1995. As were lots and lots of other people.
A lot of very hardworking people getting too little pay for something so critical while their employers (some contracting company) take a lot of profit. Eventually they burn out waiting for help and a replacement system and retire or quit, then the systems really start failing because the knowledge leaves with them.
https://x.com/_whitneywebb/status/2119846209871282200
“Generally considered,” really? Does that apply anywhere outside of r/conspiracy?
https://x.com/_whitneywebb/status/2119846209871282200
After 1962 there was too much air travel to continue to shut it down for exercises, and NORAD switched to smaller, regional level things that did not shut down air travel after that. But the results of Sky Shield III in 1962 were the only experience that the FAA had to work from when they did the full ground stop after September 11th. Sky Shield III had tested how quickly air traffic control could clear the sky in the event of a nuclear war- the USAF had put up several hundred T-33 trainers, flying them randomly around the US and Canada, and then at a certain point in the exercise the ATC had to get them all on the ground far away from major metropolitan centers (presumed lost in the war).
Update: Starship launched on schedule.
edit: #121 does load eventually:
https://www.fly.faa.gov/adv/adv_otherdis?adv_date=11132026&a...
I guess if some plane needs to do an emergency detour threw threw that space, but that seems unlikely.
I'm sure there is a reason for it but can they not be a little bit more specific?
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/a-calamity-disrupting-hundr...
"we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline, now with software containing a near-infinite amount of lines of code generated by LLMs, to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."
And everybody here on HN applauds.
https://www.sunhillo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SUN3125-... (page 3, bottom graphic)
(all the radars --> multiplexer [sadness here] --> radar data consumers)
Attention: National Radar Outage
https://www.weather.gov/afc/radaroutage
Flight Service uses a different set of radios and can relay messages to ATC, but they've been slowly dismantled over the last two decades and wouldn't have the capacity to step in for an outage (nor should they be expected to - that's not their purpose).
Some aircraft have CPDLC for text-based communication, but it's asynchronous and you can't use that as a replacement for voice communication in the terminal environment. Also, many aircraft aren't equipped to receive it.
Pilots are trained on lost comms procedures, so if you're in the air and the radio fails they'd fall back to those regulations. Basically all the aircraft would fly their last assigned clearance, and attempt to deconflict manually with other aircraft over air-to-air radio (similar to flying into an untowered airport).
There are contingencies for radio outages, but yeah, everything going down at once (if that's what's happening here, which I doubt) is bad.
So it falls back to local control, more in the style of visual flight rules. Pilots in existing flights will have to be vigilant and do their own deconflictation and new flights are banned out until the network is back up.
All conjecture at this stage of course, but all the radios won't just fail. It is probably going to be a poster child example about the dangers of large scale integration. The attraction of course is that integration is very efficient, the danger is it tends to fail all at once instead of in smaller pieces.
VFR traffic doesn't necessarily need radio, and is not affected by this groundstop.
I would hope that airports keep a battery operated radio + antenna in case of emergency with them, to at least communicate with aircraft within visual range of the airport.
I believe it's all virtualized today
I did a tour of Adelaide airport with Engineers Australia in the 1990s. We visited their obsolete IBM main frame, still running ATC in their computer room. They were tied to it by the certification of the software it was running. Just as you described.
Like if you're ordering a pizza they don't need the story of your day, why you chose pepperoni, or what movie you plan to watch. Somebody else might be interested, but not the pizza guy.
> The Weather Service “has not experienced a disruption to its radar systems today,” said Kim Doster, the spokeswoman.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-natio...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-national-weather-servi...
I am watching planes stacked up on final approach to land at KBOS as I type. From flight radar 24 they are a mix of foreign and domestic. So incoming flights are clearly being managed here.
Does this imply some potential risk from inbound international air traffic? Or maybe the FAA meant outbound? Something else I am missing?
(Sure, a flight near the Canadian or Mexican border could in theory divert to a Canadian or Mexican airport, but it's unlikely many people on those flights have their passports with them.)
In which case freezing domestic (and the huge amount of load it contributes to ATC) but keeping international normal makes sense.
Of course... the side effect is the "fun" that creates for incoming international flights with domestic connections...
There must be some procedures in place for this - I pretty regularly take domestic (Canadian) flights that pass over the US where I don't carry my passport.
Flight EY8 from Boston to Abu Dhabi https://fr24.com/ETD6PX/429055e2
The intent around the ground stop is to reduce in-air U.S. traffic.
As for asking already airborne flights to turn around, those coming in over the ocean might simply not have a non-US alternate airport available with their fuel remaining, so that's often not an option.
Oceanic flights are planned so that at every point along the route, the aircraft can lose an engine or cabin pressure and still reach a pre-approved diversion airport with enough fuel, with the flight plan marking the points where turning back versus continuing becomes the faster option. If a diversion is needed mid-ocean, the crew offsets from their assigned track and altitude to stay clear of other traffic, then heads to the nearest suitable airport, such as Gander, Keflavik or Shannon over the Atlantic, or Anchorage, Cold Bay or Midway over the Pacific.
Alternate airports are picked based with regards to all kinds of contingencies (many of them meteorological), but "the US closes literally every airport" is not one of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellow_Ribbon
So my guess this is what it means "case by case". Some which are close to destination would be manually routed, others will land in different places.
Depending on the nature of the disruption it may be they simply have drastically reduced capacity to handle traffic so landings may be much slower and they'll manage the traffic based on various priorities.
[0]https://gizmodo.com/the-faa-is-rolling-out-its-ai-air-traffi...
> [The] FAA also says a D.C.-based team of experts validates findings before they’re ever passed on to air traffic control, and the controllers retain the final decision on whether to accept SMART’s suggestions.
Seems unlikely.
There used to be a lot of invisible gatekeepers in a pre-AI world. At work, everyone can ask their agent to query SQL on databases that they were supposed to use through an application. The application and the security by obscurity(end users didn't know how to connect to the DB nor did they know SQL) were the gate keepers.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
Under the hypothesis that some under-reviewed AI generated code made it into prod, the situation could be qualified as "engineers are panicking, because they don't know if they are the cause or not"
Is it something else?
(i.e. Unloading to tarmac, buses)
https://www.news9.com/oklahoma-city-news/national-weather-se...
This article is very likely misreporting the US National Weather Service radar outage page you can find people reposting elsewhere in this comment section. The NWS page has been updated to say it does not reflect a current issue. Anecdotally, my local NWS weather radar is working fine. Also, weather doppler radar and ATC "radar" are very, very different technologies.
Given that the FAA issue also apparently relates to communications, it does seem like it might be related.
>The US National Weather Service said on Friday it was experiencing nationwide internet and communications problems that could prevent users from accessing products on its websites or cause outdated information to be displayed. Technicians were working to resolve the problems as soon as possible, the NWS said in a statement.
Edit) landed pretty uneventfully.
Current as of 1340 PDT:
There's a query form for looking up old advisories, and it's not returning anything for the last 15 days.
This will ease the pain of getting things moving again, assuming they fix it by the time the 4hr window passes.
So the flight planning system is having problems.
But also, this is about when the flight plans expire out of the system if they're not activated for departure - so it's saying unused flight plans won't be deleted for 4 hours, so pilots won't have to refile for departure.
Aviation is global, and we still need to interop with countries and airports that still use actual teletype. So the legacy protocols still remain, even though much of it is tunneled over IP links now.
Also: The keyboards used in both airplanes and in ATC facilities are often special reduced-footprint keyboards without shift/caps keys. (They're also often ABC layout rather than QWERTY.) So there's that, too.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/ground-stop-chicago-oha...
We are experiencing technical difficulties. We apologize for the inconvenience but please check back soon, as we are working to have the issues resolved.
Thank you, FAA Web Operations Team
“FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50388001
Gates were quickly full, ground ops to pull empty planes off gates takes quite a while, and about 90 mins later, we are pulling into our scheduled gate.
They don't spend a dollar more than they need to so extra gates for this would be quite the luxury. I guess what they need though is apron space or hangar space for the extra planes and the number of gates won't matter so much.
https://status.flyio.net/incidents/01M76HANB3XQC6WYKPA69WQN8...
And I don't see anyone arguing about overall funding, only arguing about who to throw millions or billions of additional dollars at chasing vague ideas of how to improve things based on what politicians and C-suites, who have no experience in the area, claim they can do. To me it looks more like grifting for contracts and kickbacks than any well thought out plans to improve things.
https://www.weather.gov/afc/radaroutage
It is a frontpage post. That's where I saw it.
Edit: screenshot here: https://i.postimg.cc/XqcsDQw9/image.png Edit 2: different link still showing: https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=1...
EVENT TIME: 13/2100 - 14/0300 USERS CAN EXPECT AIRBORNE HOLDING TO ANY AND ALL AIRPORTS WITHIN THE NAS DUE EQUIPTMENT OUTAGES. UPDATES WILL BE ISSUED AS ADITIONAL INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE. EFFECTIVE TIME:
132120-140330 SIGNATURE:
26/11/13 21:20
Edit: end date of tomorrow??? Is that just temporary?
https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=1...
maybe the last two numbers are a time range for which the thing is effective? and it's over now?
Insane. It looks like they are showing no advisory on first page view, then advisory? Can others confirm?
> Los Angeles Airport and Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International were among those that were closed, according to a list on the regulator’s website.
> The outages at O’Hare and Midway were listed as “due to equipment outage”.
https://www.ft.com/content/c9b119ff-d1da-46a7-b2b3-4ad0544ff...
If the communications issue is between US ATC regions, this makes sense. The planes are being handed off to other non-US ATCs where there is no communications issue.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vThhccsTanAz...
AI is updating it hourly. Since it is AI, always verify yourself.
But I'm completely just spitballing here.
A sequence of events:
Can anybody join these dots?https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-natio...
That tool was first unveiled for the Washington, D.C., area airports two months ago, on a day when problems with air traffic communications failures also grounded hundreds of flights, after a circuit failed and it was discovered that contractors had accidentally ripped through a fiber line that was supposed to serve as its backup.
It's actually quite impressive, you have to really try to be so bad at your job of building redundant systems that some failure mode implausibly affects everything nation wide, yet allows Canadian domestic flights to proceed fine.
Weird things happen when you destroy the federal infra, aka the USA.
Am I being hyperbolic? Well, this was the first national ground stop since 9/11... and for what?
https://fedscoop.com/faa-aviation-safety-system-doge-notam/
Did the Starship launch today just ground all flights in the USA? Maybe, maybe not. I am convinced it did. If Elon Musk can take a shred of evidence, or just make shit up, and change domestic and foreign policy, then why can't I?
We obviously live in a simulation after all, what does it matter?
Again, who knows. We can barely make enough Cybertrucks according to demand, the simulation overlords are busy.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/11/faa-expands-ai-advice-to-...
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/SMART_One-Pager.pdf
effective 2:54PM - 10:30PM central time
"... ground stop is in effect for all destinations until further notice due to rolling frequency outtage in multiple centers..."
and
"... the ground stop is now a nationwide ground stop for all centers, all destinations until further notice due to widespread frequency outtages.. ..."
https://x.com/Anna_Giaritelli/status/2121344915091206311
Which is cited in the Hindustan Times (leading Indian newspaper), which refers to the Twitter source as a journalist.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/faa-issues...
----
(EDIT: @mods / @dang: Around January this year (iirc) somehow my account ended up rate-limited, posts relatively demoted (start low, drop quickly), vouches/flags relatively ineffective, etc. Usually I don't care too much and haven't bothered to do anything about it but it is sometimes annoying - it limits participation - and right now it buries some of the more valuable information in the discussion. Could you look into fixing it? I don't know of a reason this account would be penalized. Thanks.)
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/modern-skies-trumps-transportat...
https://www.flightaware.com/miserymap/
(from Bloomberg)
https://flighty.com/airports
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US-Wifhg2Mo
You need to wait for the third shoe to drop.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
Because American infrastructure is modern, well designed, maintained and funded? Because government is competent and rational? I could absolutely believe that would happen.
--- EDIT:
This could just be the first issue that's arisen -- the FAA announced it "is expanding across the nation" on Tuesday. Which could really mean anything.
FAA Announcement: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/statements/general-statements
The Ars Technica article behind the Gizmodo one sadly doesn't have more info, either.
It'd be kind of absurd if a read-only integration took down nationwide infrastructure, but A) we've all been there... and B) the gizmodo article does mention they're also trying to phase out floppy disks for some jobs still, which tells me their CI/CD and rollback hygiene might not be top-notch. Hopefully the Real World contestant in charge of our transportation network is on site with a ClaudeCode terminal as we speak!
It does sound pretty deeply integrated, I will say:
The fact sheet has two more vaguely worrying bullet points -- I would say such wild speculation is unwarranted, but I struggle to think what else could cause all the radios in the nation to go down at once... Emphasis mine:I could see AI deploying something that just obliterates those systems with requests.
If so we are really speedrunning into idiocracy with AI.
If you agree to their nominal leadership and a 1% tax then they go away and even add you to an honorary galactic charter.
- [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-forgotten-operating-syst...
Weather service down.
Frances fridges down.
Microsoft down.
Would they tell us they were getting hacked, if this was a prelude to war ?
Or would they just say "issues yet to be determined" ?
Interesting times ladies and gentlemen.
Or, this is just what everyone that said "dont move everything into the cloud" warned about.
Yeah, probably that. :|
The US is already at war with Iran. France blamed Iran for the fridge hacks too
Everybody knows attacks are coming from Iran and Russia regularly, it's not a conspiracy theory
US-bound flight from YYZ. They shut down #2 engine and parked us in inactive runway. Pilot came on and said he was reading something about "ATC radio frequency issue" but has been told by United ops that it'll be cleared in ~30 min from now.
Last time this happened in July it was due to some network handoff issue so maybe there is some fiber cut somewhere? (My friend said last time it was NE corridor Verizon fiber cut.)
A freak FUBAR of legacy systems, an unfortunate alignment of circumstances that could have happened anytime.
Pessimistic (paranoid) cases:
1. Intentional hacking by a foreign adversary 2. Vibe coding whoops 3. OpenAI agents "running experiments"
Claude: Transmogrifying…
Shall I stop all trains too?
Cogitated for 50s · done 14:53 PM
Sure smells like something foreboding
> Airlines said flights in the air would continue.
This is a huge relief! phew
The boarded and grounded planes may start disembarking passengers at some point, especially if their crews are hitting their maximum time before mandatory rest. These delays will probably prevent replacement crews from arriving.
Update: https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/faa-issues-nationwide-grou...
Flight EY8 from Boston to Abu Dhabi https://fr24.com/ETD6PX/429055e2
There’s still lower ground telecoms for take off.
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1udup2j/trains_hal...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-faa-says-it-will-phase-o...
...so at least it's not something 911-ish
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489678
Also he says he saw a plane taking off LAX so fingers crossed. Still no news though
run jensen run
This also happened on 9/11 which is curious because the NVIDIA thing caused a public rift with Lutnick yesterday:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/bessent-blames-lutnick...
Besides popularity isn’t the determination of whether something is a good idea or not. The Korean War for example was very unpopular yet it was the right and smart thing to do.
> "FAA expands AI advice to manage air traffic congestion across entire US airspace"
* https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/11/faa-expands-ai-advice-to-...
> "FAA Is Rolling Out Its AI Air Traffic Tool Nationwide"
* https://gizmodo.com/the-faa-is-rolling-out-its-ai-air-traffi...
Company that created the tool (called Airspace Intelligence) is interesting in terms of demographics for these types of companies - implies lots if the tool 'does not work as designed' (which it will obviously not)
https://www.linkedin.com/company/airspace-intelligence/peopl...
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
It looks like the FAA started testing it in DC in September and annouced a nationwide rollout three days ago (https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/statements/general-statements). This makes it seem more unlikely to be the cause, though:
Of course, these may be the ATC analog of claude code approvals, or they may be overstating the level of human oversight/HIL - but the overall situation seems likely more serious/unclear than something like this. I'm not sure I'd call vibe air traffic control going haywire an "extraordinary" circumstance, though certainly extraordinarily stupid.When we are dealing with the FCC, grounding all flights and radio failures in open bands, you can drive a lot of changes.
There are a lot of pesky ESP32s out there, right? Did your company choose to go with the Espressif platform? You know, the hackable SDR one that crashes planes and clubs baby seals and tries to sell your grandparents bad financial scams?
And then "journalists" "feel" like they have to report on things because as long as they say they're reporting that "someone else had a feeling" they're not technically wrong, and they have bosses breathing down their necks to make the business work, to grow their monetizable audience.
And then no one knows what's true anymore, because we chose to be entertained instead of choosing to be informed.
Mr. President, there's been a second timeline-split.