The ground stop and the reopening
The Federal Aviation Administration revoked the ground stop order for flights across the entire United States on the evening of November 13, allowing takeoffs to resume. IT之家 reports this, saying the measure involved 22 regional air traffic control centers and affected tens of thousands of passengers, some of whom were stranded at hubs and potentially forced to spend the night at the airport. The lifting of the order does not resolve the problems, however: backlogged flights remain to be cleared, and delays, cancellations, and the rescheduling of aircraft and crews must be managed.
Statements by the two ministers
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that no evidence has currently emerged of a cyberattack or an AI-driven attack, and that the incident has no connection to Microsoft. He specified, however, that the investigation is ongoing and that the possibility of an attack cannot be entirely ruled out. According to Mullin, the public was never in danger, and the nationwide ground stop was ordered as an extreme precaution.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy reconstructed the timeline: at 15:36 on November 13, local time, the radar and communications center began to show instability. During the ground stop, he explained, the United States did not entirely lose telecommunications and radar signals. The FAA was also installing a software patch on the systems at the time of the emergency.
The technical cause and the costs of obsolescence
Duffy identified data overload on routers and the failure of obsolete hardware as factors in the outage, stressing that some of the air traffic control infrastructure is very old. He added that under the current administration some switches have already been replaced and that technicians have begun work to reduce the overload, expressing confidence in restoration before the peak travel season.
On funding, Duffy requested $50 billion to overhaul the air traffic control system and argued for the need for new towers and airports. The Department of Transportation had presented the Modern Skies Act plan on September 29, worth $30 billion, of which $10 billion for digital infrastructure, $10 billion for upgrading aging airport facilities, and $10 billion for building airports, with another $12.5 billion in modernization funds already underway.
What remains to be established
The authorities have not yet published definitive conclusions on the causes of the communications malfunction. Both the technical issue—the exact dynamics of the failure—and the security issue therefore remain open, with the possibility of an attack neither confirmed nor ruled out. The case brings the issue of obsolescence in US aeronautical infrastructure back to the fore, but the timing and methods of the announced investments are not defined in the available material.
