Every civilian airplane in the United States has been told not to fly, owing to a nationwide FAA ground stop. As I write this, very little is known about the nature of the safety risk or the issue underlying it.
According to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers” necessitated the action, which was undertaken for reasons of safety. The stop could keep planes on the ground for hours, or much longer. Even when the stop ends, unwinding the inevitable backup will take more time. If you’re in the air, your plane will land. But if you are at the airport waiting for one, it might be best to give up and go home.
In a sense, chaos such as this arrived long before today. Air travel has become terrible, and it has done so slowly and over a long period of time. In terms of safety, air travel is far less dangerous than driving, although an erosion of oversight, funding, infrastructure, and other factors might be changing that. James Fallows, a longtime contributor to The Atlantic, just wrote a lengthy article for The New York Times Magazine about exactly this risk. Setting aside actual safety, the experience of traveling by commercial airline has been getting worse and worse for years.
Once blue with clarity, the American skies are now clouded with uncertainty. Risk and failure are now presumed. My son’s flight from Boston to LaGuardia was delayed earlier today, before the ground stop, by weather. “You should have taken the train,” I texted him. He made it out mere hours before all planes were grounded. New York City–area airports have suffered delays in recent days due to weather—a seemingly constant issue flying in or out of that city. My son and his sister, who both live in Manhattan, decided months ago not to even try to leave town for Thanksgiving, because delays and cancellations have become so commonplace.
The reasons are many. Industry consolidation reduced routes to medium-size cities, sending more passengers through a smaller number of hubs. Passengers might have to make connections for routes that once flew direct, or drive longer distances to reach a bigger airport. Extreme weather has worsened flying conditions headed into and out of almost any airport, making arrivals and departures less reliable. Delays and disruptions can mean that equipment and crews don’t arrive for a flight on time or at all. Even when the planes and pilots are available, the Air Route Traffic Control Centers are more sparsely staffed than they once were, while the number of flights each one manages has increased.
The ARTCCs are FAA facilities distributed around the country, each one responsible for guiding aircraft through a specific region’s airspace. For example, the Chicago center handles northern Illinois and parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan. That center might hand off traffic bound for Dallas to the Kansas City center, or to Indianapolis for planes en route to Atlanta. What airport-control towers do for takeoff and landing, these centers do for the cruising portion of a flight—keeping aircraft safely spaced out from one another by assigning them altitudes or by guiding pilots around weather.
On the internet, where citizens seem to revel in conspiracism, some people have connected today’s FAA ground stop with yesterday’s Microsoft Outlook outage—and the murky notion that advanced AI models might be responsible for both, and more. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters at a news conference that a cyberattack is unlikely to have caused ground stop. Even so, a Government Accountability Office report from September identified threats in certain aspects of FAA communication systems that malicious actors could, in principle, exploit. And just yesterday, the FAA expanded the use of an AI-based air-traffic-management tool to all 22 control centers.
The controllers on the ground may not know much about the cause yet, either. “We lost all of our approach frequencies, and other facilities did too,” an air-traffic controller based in the Midwest told The Atlantic. “For this to be affecting multiple facilities nationwide doesn’t make any sort of sense.” Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport has run out of tarmac space already, causing planes to be diverted elsewhere, the controller added. “This is going to be a mess for days, if not weeks.”
Whatever the cause, once the delays inevitably happen, even big, newer airports often become inhospitable hosts. Long walks through huge hubs now feel required. Limited seating at gates makes waits of any kind uncomfortable. Frequent flyers don’t fare much better, because long queues to get into overcrowded lounges have turned those spots into marginally less horrible waiting rooms (albeit ones that also offer free cheese). The frequent traveling that would formerly have gotten you into those lounges (or upgraded to first class after leaving them, should your flight actually depart) has become optional; the airlines have found that travelers are willing to pay for those perks instead, or earn them by spending money with their airline-branded credit cards. Customer service can be truculent or impossible, requiring long telephone wait times, confusing and unreliable apps, or the traversal of even more airport hallways to self-service kiosks—none of which are guaranteed to produce results. The entire experience of flying is adversarial.
When travelers do get disrupted, like so many have been today and will be this weekend (and perhaps subsequently), they are likely to get limited assistance from the airlines, which now have more limited incentives to help and reduced consequences for failing to do so. This ground stop is not the airlines’ fault, but travelers have become inured to being treated badly no matter the cause of their travel headaches. Almost exactly a year ago, the Department of Transportation withdrew initiatives that the Biden administration had put in place to require compensation, meals, lodging, and rebooking for airline-caused disruptions, such as equipment failures. Penalties for failing to accommodate passengers also began to fall away, in favor of voluntary compliance and faith in capitalism-driven competition—even though only four major airlines (American, Delta, Southwest, and United) now account for more than three-quarters of U.S. airline seats.
Eventually, and perhaps soon, Americans will learn more about the cause of today’s nationwide ground stop. According to CNN, some airlines were told that network-router problems at Chicago Midway had cascaded nationwide, but that proximate issue might suggest different ultimate causes. Even after the cause becomes known, let alone put on the path to remedy, the deep and seemingly permanent misery of commercial flight in the United States will still roar into the air above it.
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