Many MindedA network crash grounded every U.S. flight. Now Duffy wants $50 billion
The Federal Aviation Administration halted every departing flight in the United States on Friday after communication problems hit the centers that guide planes between airports. It was only the second nationwide ground stop since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the trouble was "instability for our radar and our communications" in air traffic facilities across the country, and that the ground stop was called at 3:36 p.m. Eastern. "We have old switches, old routers, we use 1980s old copper lines," he said. "It was a legacy network problem." The FAA lifted the stop at 8:15 p.m., Duffy said, after about four and a half hours. Flight-tracking service FlightAware showed more than 10,000 delays. After the stop was lifted, it counted 5,731 cancellations of flights within, into or out of the United States.
The FAA said technicians were still investigating. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was "no indication" the outage was an attack, and later said officials had seen no sign of a cyberattack. CBS News, citing unnamed sources, reported that an update to a private communications network run by L3Harris caused the system to reboot and then crash. The FAA has not confirmed that account. Air Space Intelligence, the company behind the FAA's new SMART traffic system, said the ground stop "is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC." Microsoft, which had a separate outage this week, said it had "no indication that the FAA's nationwide ground stop is related to any Microsoft services."
This is friction for security, and it touches mobility, because a failure in the network that keeps planes safely apart stopped the country from flying. The same day, Duffy used the outage to ask Congress for a much larger check than the written request his department had sent that morning.
On Friday, before the outage, Duffy and White House budget director Russell Vought asked Congress for another $30.1 billion to upgrade airports and air traffic control, on top of $12.5 billion approved in July 2025, or $42.6 billion in all. Of the new request, $10.1 billion is for air-traffic technology, including $7.2 billion for a shared computer system and controller workstations and $2 billion for cloud computing and telecommunications; $2 billion is for control towers; and $18 billion is for airports. At an evening briefing, Duffy called the situation an "emergency" and said, "I want Congress to give us emergency funding." He asked for $50 billion for air traffic control. He did not break down the higher figure, and no new formal request has been released. Reuters reporter David Shepardson, who heard the remark, wrote that it was unclear whether Duffy was asking for $20 billion more than the morning request. The last major upgrade, NextGen, was supposed to be finished by 2025. The Transportation Department's inspector general says many key programs are over budget and delayed to 2030 or later, and that a 2017 FAA projection put the joint cost with airlines at about $36 billion. U.S. scheduled passenger airlines made $6.0 billion in after-tax profit in 2025 on $252.6 billion in operating revenue, a 2.4% margin, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Major airlines, including American, Delta, United and Southwest, have expressed support for the funding request. The FAA's Airport and Airway Trust Fund, paid for mainly by a 7.5% ticket tax and other aviation fees, had $21.8 billion in cash at the end of the 2025 fiscal year.
Source: Reuters