As will become obvious in a moment, I did not plan this video. As I am writing this, a nationwide ground stop issued by the FAA has come to an end, but not before messing up everyone’s day. The reasons for the ground stop order are not fully clear, at this time, but it is being blamed on communication equipment failure. Early statements from government officials are pointing to outdated hardware that was overloaded.
While all that may be true, and I have no doubt that our air traffic control technology needs to be updated, there’s a great deal of speculation swirling around what might have cause the equipment to overload in the first place. One thing in particular seems to be the target for a lot of people and that’s AI, specifically, the SMART system the FAA was implementing under the direction of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
SMART, which I covered just before it rolled out to Washington D.C. airports around two months ago, was set to go nationwide Friday, November 13th, the day I’m recording this. There’s a sort of rule in IT, don’t roll out changes on a Friday, much less on the 13th. Obviously, no one paid attention to that here.
I covered it in more depth previously but the high level overview of what SMART is supposed to do, is provide traffic management suggestions to air traffic controllers. The system makes the suggestions based on live flight data including weather and conveys that information to ATCs. The airline industry, reportedly, pushed back so hard on an earlier version of the system that the government curtailed the scope of the project and delayed implementation.
No one was going anywhere for much of the day on November 13. A nationwide ground stop was issued by the FAA in the aafternoon.
To be clear, at this time, there is no evidence that the issues that forced the nationwide ground stop are related to SMART. Secretary Duffy made no indications that the day’s stoppage and the rollout of SMART were connected in any way. What he did say was, “Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data … and started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”
Even if the two are truly completely unrelated, when rolling out a new AI system nationwide, after strong resistance to it being used at all, and then having a system outage so dire that the FAA issues a nationwide ground stop… well, it doesn’t look great. Putting this into context, there have only been three nationwide ground stops ever. One was on 9/11, another in 2023 due to pilot alert system issues, and now this one. This isn’t trivial, far from it.
The National Weather Service did say that it was aware of a national radar outage impacting radar.weather.gov, so that may be contributing to the delays, or it may be connected to the cause. Currently, we do not know. I’m going to be keeping an eye on this and I’m sure that there will be more for me to say later.
During the multi hour nationwide ground stop, thousands of flights were delayed or cancelled. We’ll be sorting this out for days.
On top of all that, Amtrak’s ticketing system went down this evening, so you couldn’t even buy a train ticket. It didn’t stop the trains from running, it just meant you couldn’t purchase a ticket.
Secretary Duffy called on congress to fund $50 billion for a “complete overhaul” of the system following these events. Regardless of whether SMART was the failure source or not, which we do not know at this time either way, the country’s AATC infrastructure does need a massive update. That’s something that we should be funding because the Secretary is correct that if we don’t invest into this, events like this will happen more often.
For all the travelers impacted by this today and into the weekend, if you booked with a travel agent, reach out to them for advice right now. None of us have the power to make the planes fly, but we can help you manage this and navigate around it. We are already doing exactly that with our clients and you can bet that travel is going to be snarled up for at least the next few days.
