Air traffic control vulnerabilities in the United States stopped being an abstract audit finding on Monday 21 September 2026. A telecommunications circuit at a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) facility near Philadelphia had been throwing errors since Sunday, so traffic was moved to a backup fibre line. On Monday morning a construction crew in New Jersey cut that backup. Air traffic controllers lost the links that carry radar and radio data, and the FAA halted arrivals at Newark, Philadelphia, JFK and LaGuardia for hours.
Two days later Reuters published a wider account of the problem. It described an air traffic control system that relies on outdated telecom networks, decades-old Compaq computers and replacement parts bought on eBay. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the telecom architecture was 40 years old. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said every facility was a silo and that the agency was “behind 20 years”.
This article explains what failed on 21 September and why a single cable could ground so many flights. It sets out what government auditors found in a report published one week before the outage and why forty years of upgrade plans left the gaps open. It also covers what the new $12.5 billion programme buys, what it will really cost, and what other organisations can learn from how air traffic control broke.
Table of contents
- The 21 September Outage That Exposed Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities
- How Far the Air Traffic Control Disruption Spread
- How One Cut Cable Exposed Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities in Telecom
- Old Computers and Floppy Disks: Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities Inside the Towers
- Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities by the Numbers
- A Timeline of Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities Since 2023
- Four Decades of Stalled Upgrades Behind Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities
- Can the Brand New System Close Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities?
- What Fixing Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities Will Cost
- Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities Are Not Only American
- What Organisations Can Learn From Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities
- What to Watch Next in Air Traffic Control
- Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities FAQ
- References and Further Reading
The 21 September Outage That Exposed Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities
The air traffic control outage began with a fault that nobody outside the FAA saw. It ended with more than 600 flights cancelled at Newark alone. The sequence matters, because it shows how two ordinary problems combined into a regional shutdown.
Sunday: error messages on the primary circuit
On Wednesday 23 September Bedford gave the fullest account so far. According to Reuters, a series of error messages appeared on a telecommunications circuit at the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control facility, known as Philadelphia TRACON. The FAA’s contractor, L3Harris, advised switching to the backup fibre line on Sunday so that it could start troubleshooting the primary circuit. That left the facility running on a single path, with nothing behind it.
Monday morning: the backup is cut
At about 9:45 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, a crew working for a New Jersey Transit contractor severed a fibre-optic cable between New Brunswick and North Brunswick. The crew was working on NJ Transit’s Delco Lead project. The cable belonged to Verizon, and it was the backup line now carrying Philadelphia TRACON’s traffic. Bedford told CBS News that about 600 feet of the backup fibre had been cut out.
With both paths down, the air traffic control facility lost the connections that carry radar and communications data. Philadelphia TRACON handles arrivals and departures for Philadelphia and, through one of its areas, for Newark and the surrounding airports.
Ground stops spread through the Northeast
The FAA stopped traffic into Newark, Teterboro and Philadelphia at about 10:00 a.m., according to NBC New York as reported by Airways. JFK and LaGuardia were added at about 1:00 p.m. Boston Logan stopped accepting flights because of spillover, and Washington National halted flights for more than an hour because of volume. No commercial flight landed at Newark from about 9:40 a.m. until just after 5:20 p.m., according to Flightradar24 data.
At 6:04 p.m. Duffy posted that the telecom lines had been repaired and that operations were resuming. He warned that clearing the backlog would take time.
| When (Eastern time) | What happened | Reported by |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday 20 Sept | Error messages on the primary circuit; traffic moved to the backup fibre for troubleshooting | Reuters, citing the FAA |
| Mon, about 9:40 | Last commercial landing at Newark until the evening | Flightradar24 via NBC New York |
| Mon, about 9:45 | Contractor crew severs the Verizon backup fibre near New Brunswick | NJ Transit |
| Mon, about 10:00 | Ground stops at Newark, Teterboro and Philadelphia | NBC New York via Airways |
| Mon, about 13:00 | JFK and LaGuardia added; Boston stops taking diversions | NBC New York, CBS New York |
| Mon, about 17:20 | Commercial landings resume at Newark | Flightradar24 via NBC New York |
| Mon, 18:04 | Duffy says the lines are repaired and operations are resuming | Duffy on X |
A dispute over who cut the line
Duffy first blamed “an Amtrak construction crew”. Amtrak denied it and said the work was on NJ Transit property with an NJ Transit contractor. NJ Transit said the crew was working about 10 feet from the markings that show where underground utilities run. It was checking whether Verizon or the contractor had made those markings. Verizon said the cable was its own but that its technicians did not cut it, and told CNN it “bears no responsibility for this incident”.
The argument over markings is not a side issue. When the primary is already out, a backup that one construction crew can cut becomes a single point of failure. That point sits at the centre of the air traffic control vulnerabilities this article examines.
How Far the Air Traffic Control Disruption Spread
The numbers vary by source and by the time each count was taken, but every count is large. Monday’s outage fell on the day that about 130 world leaders were arriving in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, which made the timing worse.
Newark took the hardest hit
Newark is a United Airlines hub and sits under Philadelphia TRACON’s airspace, so it suffered most. NBC News counted nearly 619 cancelled flights at Newark and 197 at Philadelphia as of 6 p.m. CNN, citing FlightAware, reported that Newark had more cancellations on Monday than any other airport in the world. Business Insider mapped 165 diverted flights. Some Lufthansa and Swiss flights from Europe turned around over the Atlantic.
Two different national totals
On Monday, Reuters cited FlightAware’s count of about 7,000 US flights delayed or cancelled, including 1,400 at the three main New York airports. In its report on Wednesday, Reuters put the Monday figure at about 9,500 flights delayed or cancelled, and Simple Flying used the same number. The honest summary is that between 7,000 and 9,500 flights were affected, depending on which count and cut-off you use.
Why the delays outlasted the repair
A repaired line does not clear a schedule. Aircraft and crews were in the wrong places, and airports had to meter arrivals. At about 6:40 p.m., after the lines were back, the FAA was still reporting long average delays, according to Fox Business as cited by Airways.
Newark’s average delay of 306 minutes is more than five hours. Bar lengths are each airport’s delay divided by Newark’s.
An apology and a coincidence
Bedford apologised. “The timing is absolutely horrible and I’m very sorry for the delays and cancellations,” he told reporters. The same day, the FAA began limited operation of SMART, its new AI planning system, in the Washington, DC area. Reports found no link between the two. We covered that system in our explainer on FAA SMART, the $875M air traffic AI.
How One Cut Cable Exposed Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities in Telecom
Air traffic controllers do not sit next to the radars and radios they use. Their screens and headsets are fed by telecom circuits, many leased from commercial carriers. When those circuits fail, air traffic controllers are still at their desks but cannot see or talk to aircraft.
Primary and backup were not independent
Regional facilities use two lines to carry radar and communications data, a primary and a backup. That design only protects you if both lines cannot fail at the same time. On 21 September the primary was already out of service for troubleshooting. So a single construction accident was enough.
Bedford said the failed circuit was an older Verizon circuit that was due for replacement under the modernisation programme, according to NBC New York. He described the fibre break as “massive” and said it could take about 13 hours to repair. Service came back after roughly eight hours, and Duffy’s post did not say which line was restored first.
The same facility failed in 2025
Philadelphia TRACON has a history. In late April 2025, failures of old telecom lines and systems there left controllers without radar and radio contact with aircraft at Newark for about 90 seconds, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). A second outage followed in May 2025. The GAO said the FAA blamed old copper wiring. It also blamed the decision to move Newark’s airspace to Philadelphia without properly testing the reliability of the commercial lines used for critical data.
A 40-year-old architecture
Duffy put the problem plainly on Tuesday. “The architecture of our telecom is still a 40-year-old architecture, which means you could have a switch go down and a line be cut yesterday and the Northeast goes down,” he said, according to Reuters. He added: “These incidents will continue to happen unless we get the resources and actually build the architecture fit for the 21st century.”
On Wednesday Bedford went further. “We need to get rid of the old system,” he said. “When it fails, we just don’t have the redundancy that we would get if we had a modern architecture.” He said the FAA runs three telecom systems that do not work with each other, linked by a “clunky connection” that often forces delays.
Not the first cable cut
In September 2025, a contractor cut fibre lines near Dallas. Reuters reported that more than 2,000 flights were delayed and hundreds cancelled at two Dallas-area airports, affecting 100,000 American Airlines passengers alone. The GAO recorded that the Dallas TRACON lost radar, frequencies and automation equipment, and that controllers reverted to manual methods to release flights. Construction damage is a known risk. What turns it into a national story is the lack of a second, truly separate route.
Old Computers and Floppy Disks: Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities Inside the Towers
The telecom links are only one layer of air traffic control. The equipment at each end is often older still, and this is where the air traffic control vulnerabilities become hard to fix quickly.
Compaq computers in the towers
Bedford told Reuters that the FAA’s towers effectively run on individual Compaq computers. Compaq was bought by HP, and the brand stopped producing computers in 2013. He also said the FAA’s more than 300 air traffic control facilities cannot talk to one another and operate on individual analogue computers. “Every facility is a silo,” he said.
Spare parts from eBay and 3D printers
Old air traffic control hardware needs spare parts that no one makes any more. According to Reuters, the FAA has used 3D printing and has gone to eBay for replacement parts for some systems. For others, it can no longer get spare parts at all. The GAO found the same problem from the other side. Aging systems are hard to maintain because parts are unavailable and the technicians who understood them are retiring.
Floppy disks and 1980s screens
The GAO’s September 2026 report lists specific air traffic control weaknesses. Legacy information display systems in control facilities rely on “obsolete technology (e.g., floppy disks)” and interfaces from the 1980s. The FAA’s 450 legacy voice switches support only analogue communication, and most have passed end of life. Many of the 42,000 radios have been out of production since 2015 or earlier. Radar components are no longer made and have passed, or will soon pass, their planned 20-year life.
Paper flight strips
Many air traffic control towers still track aircraft on printed paper strips. That has real safety consequences. In August 2023 at San Diego, the printer for the paper strips jammed. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, as summarised by the GAO, the controllers tried to fix the printer instead of using the backup. A Cessna Citation then overflew a Southwest aircraft by about 100 feet.
Reuters reported that 18 major airports have now dropped paper strips, and that the full change at 49 major airports will take until at least 2028. Simple Flying, citing Bedford earlier this month, put the number of towers moved to electronic displays at 21. The counts differ, but both are small against the 89 airports now planned.
| Legacy system | Problem named by the GAO | Planned replacement | New target date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telecom lines | Copper cables from the 1960s; carriers no longer support the technology | 5,170 lines to fibre; nearly 30,000 services to IP | Dec 2028 (was Sept 2030) |
| Voice switches | Analogue only; most past end of life | All 450 replaced with IP switches | Nov 2028 (was Sept 2037) |
| Radios | Many out of production since 2015 or earlier | Digital radios at 1,581 sites | Dec 2028 (was Sept 2037) |
| Information displays | Floppy disks and 1980s interfaces | One Enterprise Information Display System at 435 locations | Sept 2028 (was Sept 2034) |
| Paper flight strips | Untimely data; printer failures | Electronic strips at 89 airports | Nov 2028 |
| Radars | Components no longer made; past 20-year life | 612 new radars (electronics, not antennas) | Dec 2028 |
Dates are from GAO’s Table 2 (status as of May 2026). “Was” is the completion date the FAA planned before the current programme.
Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities by the Numbers
The most useful single figure comes from the FAA’s own risk review. After the nationwide ground stop in January 2023, the agency assessed the sustainability of every air traffic control system. The GAO reported the results in September 2024 and repeated them in its new report.
Three in four systems at risk
Of the FAA’s 138 air traffic control systems, 51 (37%) were rated unsustainable and 54 (39%) potentially unsustainable. That leaves 33 systems, or about 24%, in neither group. The FAA cited unavailable parts, lost expertise in outdated technology and growth in airspace demand.
The third bar is arithmetic: 138 minus 51 minus 54 leaves 33, which is 24% of the total.
The critical subset
Not every aging system matters equally. Of the 105 systems rated unsustainable or potentially unsustainable, 58 had critical operational effects on the safety and efficiency of the airspace. In 2024 the GAO also singled out 17 systems as especially concerning. The fixes already under way for them were not due for at least six years, and some not for ten. For four of the 17 there was no investment at all.
The scale of what the systems carry
These are not niche tools. Air traffic controllers handle up to 45,000 flights a day, according to the GAO. The airspace includes 409 towers, 119 combined tower and radar approach facilities, 25 standalone TRACONs and 21 en route centres. The telecom network connects about 5,000 FAA facilities, radars, voice systems and data links.
Simple Flying reported another measure. Equipment-related delay minutes in 2025 were about 300% higher than the 2010 to 2024 average. That figure shows the problem growing faster than the fixes.
A Timeline of Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities Since 2023
Monday’s air traffic control outage was not a one-off. The same pattern repeats: an old component fails, a backup is missing or weak, and flights stop. The table below lists the incidents that the GAO and Reuters highlight.
| Date | Incident | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Jan 2023 | NOTAM system for notices to pilots, then over 30 years old, fails after a contractor deletes files | First nationwide ground stop since 9/11; about 1,300 cancellations and almost 10,000 delays |
| Feb 2023 | FedEx and Southwest close call at Austin; no surface detection equipment | NTSB names missing equipment as a factor |
| Aug 2023 | Paper-strip printer jams at San Diego | Aircraft pass about 100 feet apart |
| Feb and Mar 2025 | Notice system fails again | New backup limits the damage, but delays still occur |
| Late Apr 2025 | Philadelphia TRACON telecom failure | About 90 seconds without radar or radio contact at Newark |
| May 2025 | Second Philadelphia TRACON outage | Another ground stop; hundreds of delays and cancellations |
| Sept 2025 | Contractor cuts fibre lines near Dallas | Loss of radar and frequencies; more than 2,000 flights delayed |
| 21 Sept 2026 | Primary circuit out for troubleshooting, backup fibre cut | Northeast ground stops; 7,000 to 9,500 flights affected |
What the incidents have in common
Three causes repeat. The first is age: a 30-year-old notice system, 1960s copper, a strip printer. The second is thin redundancy: backups that share a weakness with the primary or cannot take the load. The third is dependence on contractors and third parties, from the worker who deleted files in 2023 to the crews who cut fibre in Dallas and New Jersey. Each of these air traffic control vulnerabilities is well understood. The difficulty has always been fixing them while the system keeps running.
Safety, not only delay
Most coverage counts cancelled flights. The GAO’s list is a reminder that near collisions sit on the same list. The report notes near collisions in early 2025 at Phoenix Sky Harbor and Chicago Midway, where preliminary findings pointed to both human and technology errors.
Four Decades of Stalled Upgrades Behind Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities
Every administration since the early 1980s has promised to modernise air traffic control, and each plan fell short. The record explains why today’s air traffic control vulnerabilities survived so many plans.
The 1982 plan
In 1982 the FAA released its first comprehensive plan to improve air traffic control services. It estimated the cost at about $10 billion, with full benefits by the late 1990s. The plan aimed to consolidate facilities and standardise computer hardware and software. By 1995 the GAO said the estimated cost had grown to $36 billion. It placed FAA modernisation on its high-risk list that year, and the plan’s largest part, the Advanced Automation System, had to be drastically reworked.
NextGen
The next big effort, NextGen, began in 2003, with the FAA publishing its first plan in 2004. Reuters noted that it was once pegged at $15 billion. The Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) later described it as an estimated $36 billion joint effort by the FAA and airlines, due by 2025. By the end of 2024 the FAA had invested more than $15 billion, yet had achieved only about 16% of NextGen’s total expected benefits.
“Overall, FAA has delivered a delayed, over budget, and less transformational NextGen than originally planned,” the OIG wrote in its September 2025 capstone memo.
Why the plans stalled
The GAO lists five reasons that have recurred over four decades:
- The FAA defined its requirements poorly.
- It did not involve stakeholders enough in planning, development and testing.
- It did not oversee contractors and their deliverables closely enough.
- It did not receive full funding for its modernisation efforts.
- It relied on overly optimistic estimates.
Bar lengths are each figure divided by $36 billion. The later NextGen figure is a joint FAA and industry total.
The pattern in the chart is consistent. Each plan starts with a figure that later roughly doubles or more. The current programme is following the same path within its first year.
Can the Brand New System Close Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities?
In May 2025, after the Newark outages, Duffy announced the Brand New Air Traffic Control System, usually shortened to BNATCS. In July 2025 Congress appropriated $12.5 billion for it in the law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Of that, $9 billion went to systems modernisation and $3.5 billion to facilities.
Phase 1: 13 programmes by December 2028
The first phase has 13 programmes, most of which speed up work that was already planned. It covers telecom, voice switches, radios, radars, surface awareness, surface movement radar, information displays, electronic flight strips, three weather systems, Alaska flight service automation and tower simulators. The FAA wants it all finished by December 2028.
The speed-ups are large. The FAA now plans to finish replacing copper telecom lines about 21 months earlier than before. It plans to finish replacing voice switches 106 months earlier and radios 105 months earlier. In December 2025 it hired Peraton as prime systems integrator, on a contract with a ceiling of $1.5 billion, to coordinate the work.
Progress so far
The FAA has started nine of the 13 programmes. As of May 2026, it had replaced 2,560 of 5,170 copper lines with fibre, about 50%, and about 17% of radio sites, according to the GAO. Earlier this month Bedford gave newer figures, reported by Simple Flying: more than 64% of copper replaced, 403 radio sites converted, 101 surface awareness systems installed and 21 towers moved off paper strips. He now expects obsolete copper to be gone by September 2027.
Bedford was also frank about the limits. Replacing copper with fibre will not be enough to prevent future outages, he said on Wednesday, according to Reuters. The FAA needs a modern telecom system on an existing network such as Verizon or AT&T. He said the first phase did not have enough money to address that, “which probably might have been a bad decision”.
Phase 2: new automation, no dates
The second phase is meant to replace the core air traffic control systems used to track aircraft. That means a Common Automation Platform to replace both the en route and terminal automation systems, and a new traffic flow system. The FAA says Phase 2 will need about $10.2 billion for systems alone. It has no start or finish date because it has not been funded.
Parts of the Traffic Flow Management System it would replace, especially at remote sites, are expected to become untenable by 2027. Reuters reported that analogue-to-digital communications should arrive in late 2027, with facilities later moving from individual computers to the cloud.
What the programme does not fix on its own
Even a fully delivered Phase 1 leaves questions. The radar work replaces electronics but not antennas or rotary joints. A follow-on programme for those is only “envisioned” after 2028. And the GAO notes that most of the phase is acceleration of existing investments rather than new design. That is sensible for speed, but it means old architecture decisions carry forward unless Phase 2 is funded and built.
What Fixing Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities Will Cost
Officials are now asking for far more than the original $12.5 billion for air traffic control. The figures do not all measure the same thing, so it helps to separate them.
Duffy’s $30 billion request
On 22 September, the day after the outage, Duffy said the administration would ask Congress for another $30 billion. According to Reuters, as summarised by Simple Flying, about $10 billion would go to replacing aging towers and about $10 billion to telecom and other air traffic control technology. The last $10 billion would go to airport improvements. Not all of it is for air traffic control.
Bedford’s $27 billion total
On 23 September Bedford said he thinks the upgrade will cost $27 billion in total. Including money from other accounts, Congress needs to approve another $10.5 billion for the project, he said, according to Reuters. That is a narrower measure than Duffy’s request, because it covers the air traffic control programme rather than towers and airports as well.
GAO: Phase 1 already costs more than it received
The GAO report of 14 September compared what Congress appropriated for Phase 1 systems with the FAA’s own June 2026 estimate. The gap is $1.585 billion. The FAA plans to cover $1.011 billion from its 2026 budget. That leaves $574 million, and the President’s 2027 budget asks for about $565 million.
| Phase 1 programme area | Appropriated ($M) | FAA estimate ($M) | Difference ($M) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telecom, voice switches and radios | 4,750 | 5,910 | +1,160 |
| Radars, surface awareness and surface radar | 3,500 | 2,909 | -591 |
| Information displays | 300 | 637 | +337 |
| Electronic flight strips (TFDM) | 300 | 684 | +384 |
| Weather systems | 80 | 185 | +105 |
| Alaska automation | 0 | 198 | +198 |
| Tower simulators | 100 | 92 | -8 |
| Total | 9,030 | 10,615 | +1,585 |
Figures are from GAO’s Table 3. The radar row combines two GAO lines: radars ($3,000M against $2,440M) and surface awareness with surface radar ($500M against $469M).
No lifecycle estimate and 11,389 schedules
The GAO’s main concern is not the gap itself but how little the FAA knows about the true cost. It found no comprehensive lifecycle cost estimate. FAA officials could not provide the analysis behind their $10.6 billion Phase 1 figure. That figure also leaves out government costs, most operations and maintenance, and all of Phase 2. The GAO says the administrator issued a blanket waiver from nearly all of the agency’s normal acquisition rules to move faster. The Transportation Department disputes that this waived the cost-estimate requirement.
Scheduling is just as loose. Instead of an integrated master schedule, the programme had 11,389 separate project schedules that were not linked. The GAO gave an example: technicians are due at a facility in St. Louis in April 2027 to prepare for a new voice switch, and again in January 2028 to prepare for new displays. Each extra visit disrupts a working control room.
“In essence, the FAA is buying delivery speed at the risk of cost uncertainty and potential disruptions,” the GAO concluded. It made two recommendations, a lifecycle cost estimate and an integrated schedule. The Transportation Department partially agreed with both.
Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities Are Not Only American
Reuters pointed out that the United Kingdom has had its own air traffic control failures this month, at NATS. The UK cases show a different kind of weakness, in software rather than cables.
8 September: a one-millisecond software defect
On 8 September a defect in the flight data system of NATS, the UK’s main air traffic control provider, forced restrictions across the country. More than 2,000 flights were delayed, cancelled or diverted, according to NATS’s preliminary report, as reported by Airways. A higher-priority message arrived during the millisecond in which a squawk-code allocation was part-way through an update. The allocation did not resume correctly, and the corrupted data affected later flight updates. NATS described a previously unknown defect that had never been triggered because the window was so narrow.
21 September: a second disruption
On 21 September, the same day as the US outage, a connectivity problem at NATS’s Prestwick centre caused further disruption to UK flights. Airlines again questioned the resilience of the UK system after the second failure in two weeks.
Two routes to the same result
The UK failure was a rare timing bug in old software. The US failure was a physical cable cut on top of an old circuit. Both show the same design problem. Critical systems built decades ago have a small number of points where one fault stops everything. Neither country’s backup arrangements stopped a regional or national disruption.
What Organisations Can Learn From Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities
Most businesses do not run air traffic control, but many run on the same pattern of old systems, leased circuits and thin backups. The FAA’s air traffic control experience offers practical lessons.
Check that your backup really is separate
The FAA had a primary and a backup, and still lost both. Ask where your two internet or WAN circuits run physically, whether they share a duct, a building entry or a carrier exchange, and what happens when one is out for maintenance. Diverse routing is a design choice, and it belongs in your network design from the start. Our guide to backup, disaster recovery and high availability explains how the three differ.
Treat maintenance windows as risk windows
The primary circuit was out because someone was troubleshooting it. That is exactly when a second fault hurts most. Before taking one path out of service, confirm the health of the other and tell the people who could be affected.
Count the systems you cannot replace parts for
If your team buys spares on eBay, you have an unsustainable system, whatever the asset register says. An honest technical debt audit rates each system the way the FAA did, then funds the riskiest first.
Budget for the whole lifecycle
The GAO’s complaint about the FAA applies to most IT projects. Estimate operations, maintenance and the second phase, not only the purchase. When you choose how to modernise, weigh the options in our guide to legacy system modernisation, from rehosting to replacement.
Link your schedules
Thousands of separate project plans mean repeat site visits and missed conflicts. Even a small organisation benefits from one schedule that shows every change to a site or system.
Include security and third parties in resilience
Resilience and cybersecurity overlap. A modern IP network brings new risks as well as new redundancy, and contractors, carriers and builders all sit in your failure chain. Utility markings, contract terms and emergency contacts deserve the same attention as firewalls.
What to Watch Next in Air Traffic Control
Several decisions will show whether the promised air traffic control fixes arrive in time.
Congress and the funding requests
Congress must decide on the $10.5 billion Bedford says the air traffic control programme still needs and on Duffy’s wider $30 billion request. Watch how much is for air traffic control telecom rather than towers and airports.
The telecom milestones
Bedford expects obsolete copper to be gone by September 2027 and digital communications to arrive in late 2027. The new telecom architecture he wants is not yet funded. The FAA forecasts more than 40% growth in commercial flights by 2046, so capacity will keep rising while the work continues.
The investigation into the cut
NJ Transit was checking whether Verizon or its contractor made the utility markings. The answer matters for liability and for how the FAA protects critical routes from construction.
The GAO’s recommendations
Watch whether the FAA produces a lifecycle cost estimate and an integrated schedule. Without them, it will be hard to know whether the $27 billion figure will hold.
Air Traffic Control Vulnerabilities FAQ
What caused the 21 September outage?
A telecom circuit at Philadelphia TRACON had shown errors on Sunday, so traffic was moved to a backup fibre line. On Monday morning a contractor crew working for NJ Transit cut that backup near New Brunswick. With both paths down, air traffic controllers lost radar and communications links, and the FAA stopped flights into several Northeast airports.
How old are FAA computers?
Bedford told Reuters that towers effectively run on individual Compaq computers, a brand that stopped production in 2013. Some telecom cables date from the 1960s, and some display systems still use floppy disks.
How many flights were affected?
Reuters first cited FlightAware’s count of about 7,000 US flights delayed or cancelled. Its later report put the figure at about 9,500. Newark alone had nearly 619 cancellations by 6 p.m., according to NBC News.
How much will fixing it cost?
Congress has approved $12.5 billion. Bedford estimates $27 billion in total and says another $10.5 billion is needed. Duffy has asked for $30 billion more, including money for towers and airports.
Was the new AI system involved?
No. The FAA began limited use of its SMART planning system in the Washington area the same day. Reports found no link between it and the outage.
