FAA ground stop sparks concerns: Former air traffic controller weighs in

We want to bring in a former air traffic controller. His name is Rob. Rob, thanks so much for being with us. You'll be able to give us some more insight, too, on what's going on here. First, I guess, what was your reaction to hearing that there was a nationwide ground stop and only the second since 9-11? When I first heard it, I thought maybe somebody was putting me on, just to see what I would think about that. But when I heard it was real, the first thing I thought was the word, The word chaos came to my mind because a nationwide ground stop, and we had some idea of what was going on on 9-11. But today, we don't know anything. And honestly, as Joe was saying, and I know Joe, he's a straight shooter too, and I think the FAA has absolutely no idea what is going on. How long it's going to take to fix and to your earlier question about what happens the longer this goes on. We've seen examples over the years of what happens when an airline Southwest had a meltdown three or four Christmases ago. You know, Americans had one and it takes days, just days just to get that one carrier back Because everybody ends up in the wrong place. And as Joe said, out of duty time or whatever. And not to mention, the passengers are sitting there saying, what are we doing? And the people up front in the airplane are saying, folks, we honestly don't know. Because right now, that's all I've heard is that nobody knows. Yeah, Rob, you've worked in towers and radar rooms before. For a situation like this, what's going on up there? Well, actually, unless an airplane is inbound to land, it's probably being rather quiet at the moment because nobody's, they're not allowing anybody to take off. So you're not adding to the mess. And again, the only people that are in the skies are people that are inbound to land. So everybody is probably sitting around. Saying, okay, so what do we do now? And that's the issue is that they really, even the supervisors, probably can't get any answers. I'd imagine a lot of people wondering, I'm wondering too, you hear, okay, communication problems. Pilots are still able to land, but who's helping them land if there's communication issues? Well, it's not a communications issue probably in the local facilities, like at O'Hare or Midway or something like that. It sounds like this is a center issue, an in-route communication issue. And what I'm not clear on at this point is whether it's a communication issue. With the aircraft or if it is a communications issue between the centers, because they're also able to speak. So at least I haven't heard anything that gives me anything definite on that. Rob, let me ask you about the question that was being posed to DHS Secretary Mayorkas about a possible AI system that could have possibly been tested today. Have you heard anything in your circles, I'm sure you're still in communication with people in the aviation field and the FAA, have you heard anything about this being something Something that was on the horizon. Well, the FAA did issue a press release, oh, probably a month ago, about this new smart technology that they were going to use to speed air traffic decisions to the controllers. And being a former controller, of course, being a pilot, I was curious as all get out to figure out how it worked. And nobody had any answers. They just said. Trust us. It's going to be really cool. It's going to save everybody a lot of work and reduce controller stress. And now it could be related to that. It could be absolutely unrelated. Again, we just don't know at this point. I am curious to know, you know, when things do pick up and when things do resume, how who gets to go first? I mean, what's the process like? I'm like, if I'm sitting on the tarmac for longer than you, do I go first? Do you like how do you work that out? Well, I think what everybody's going to wait to see first is when FAA eliminates the ground stop. At that point, it's back to being a normal airport or a normal in-route center, and then it's going to be first come, first serve. But, of course, you're going to have this system backed up for... God knows how many hours, hopefully not days, but it's going to be a circus trying to get this back to normal. So if you had reservations today or tomorrow or perhaps even Sunday, I'd say good luck. It's going to take some work. Yeah, and in a situation like this, I don't know if you know... I mean, if it's, you know, there are always those conversations when it's a weather event, for instance, or even a mechanical event of what the air, what's the onus for the airline, or what's the onus for the person, the traveler, whatever. How do you make sense of that in this type of situation as to like, all right, if I do have to cancel my flight, do I get my money back from the airline or how do I even go about getting any compensation for that? I think it's a little early to talk about compensation because we probably still have lots and lots of people stuck on airplanes, sitting on ramps at the airport with everybody trying to figure out what to do next. As they deplane these people, the customer service crews will probably be overwhelmed at the gate and But again, we don't know what kind of issues they'll be dealing with. And again, every airline deals with mechanicals or weather generally a little bit differently. But this is at the moment kind of, this is unprecedented. So we're gonna really be charting some new ground here. Answer this for me, Rob, you know, yes, you say it's going to take hours for everything to get back to normal. I'm going to sound like a two year old. But why? Why is it going to take hours for everything to get back to normal? Walk us through that process. Because you have to realize, you know, you're in one studio, one TV studio. Imagine if the system that broadcasts your signal out to people here in Chicagoland was part of a nationwide network. And there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other stations that were also, you know, on that network. And it went down, but then it comes back up. And everybody says, well, wait, make sure we get in there. And somebody else is yelling, well, what about us? And there's somebody in the back saying, yeah, but we've been here for an hour. And, you know, again, this is something that's going to be very delicate for the airlines to deal with. And, of course, the airlines are going to. You know, end up pointing the finger at the FAA saying, look, it's not our fault. We don't have to do anything. We're doing the best we can. So, you know, talk to the government. GOVERNMENT. At least that's how I see this potentially going. Wow. Which means there's going to be a lot of... frustration for quite some time here. I want to go back to something that Joe touched on earlier and get your perspective on it. And he was mentioning the longer this goes on, running into even flight hours for the crew and running out of that time. So it doesn't matter if they're in the air, or I guess I'm asking, does it matter whether they're in the air or You're on the ground. On that flight, their flight time is still running. Yeah, the clocks are still ticking because we're, you know, our schedules are based on duty time. And if that duty time is spent in the airplane cruising at 41,000 feet between Chicago and L.A. or the Bahamas or anywhere else, that's great. But if the airplane breaks on the ground, let's say it's Chicago, and it's a, let's say it's an engine problem, and they say, oh, my gosh. We've got to replace the engine, or we've got to get a spare airplane here. The clock is still ticking for the pilots. And when they hit the magic number, and I couldn't tell you what it is for each airline, but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 12 hours of duty time. But that's added into wherever it was they were before. They were in Chicago. So if they did extra trips today, maybe they started out in Miami and went to Denver and sat there for a while, changed planes or maybe grabbed new passengers, then came to O'Hare and sat. And it all counts for that total duty time. And once the clock rings out, pilots say, sorry, guys, we're done. But how do you even handle that when... Again, it's a nationwide outage, which would mean that there are people who may have been off the clock or should have been off the clock two hours ago, versus people who would be off the clock maybe two hours from now. They're all in the same situation. Well, as Joe said, it's pretty busy these days, and it is... Is, um... It is packed together. The airline system is packed together pretty tightly using every available airplane, pilot, flight attendant, mechanic, piece of airspace, air traffic controller. And all you need is one small cough to really set things into chaos mode. But with the entire system on a ground stop, this is gonna be a big one. Yeah, like you said, it's unprecedented. The last one in 2023, I think it lasted about Two hours, maybe maybe 90 minutes or so. Rob, I'm curious. O'Hare Midway. We were talking about this earlier. They already were under a ground stop before the national one hit for an equipment outage. What does that make you think? Obviously, we don't know whether there's a link between the two, but just interesting timing, I guess. Right. Well, it is interesting, and of course, they may have been privy to information before the national system, before somebody in the... There's what they call an FAA command center out in Washington that kind of watches the air traffic system nationwide. And we in the Midwest may have been privy to some piece of information that regionally they said, okay, we're done. You've put everybody on the ground for now because this is just turning into a really chaotic situation. And then they learned that it was also nationwide. But again, I'm only speculating on that. Yeah, and as we continue to look at these live pictures and we do eclipse past that 90 minute window. And so the... Issues that we've discussed are being literally exacerbated by the minute now. Um... What's going through your mind? I mean, what is going through your mind? I think what's going, it's... Probably not going to sound really warm and fuzzy, but I'm just thinking I'm glad I wasn't flying today because, you know, luckily, I mean, I flew business jet, private business jets until I retired. But we only had to look in the back and talk to the boss and maybe a half a dozen other passengers. But, you know, some of these airline crews are facing hundreds and hundreds of people in the back that are sitting on taxiways saying... Okay, we're not going anywhere. Let's go back to the gate. Let me get off the airplane, and I'll figure something. Well, they can't even do that because just in the videos that you just showed, I mean, they're backed up nose to tail, and there's nowhere to go. And, of course, one other issue we haven't even spoken about is that there's limited gate access at O'Hare. I mean, and that whole system is based on one comes in, It goes out and another one jumps right in and takes that gate. I mean, it can be timed that tightly. Thank you very much. But now with all of these airplanes wanting to deplane people later tonight all over the airport and airports all over the nation. This is going to make for some really unhappy people, and again, I wouldn't want to be a customer service agent tonight because they're going to be really overwhelmed. Yeah, I know commercial flights are involved here, but it makes me think too. What about medical flights or organ transplant or transports? Right, and I doubt that they're making any exceptions even for those. Yeah, this is quite the situation that we're in, and it has a nation, you know, because it's something that affects every city, every airport right now. Well, I don't know. What are the things that you feel like the last time we did have a nationwide ground stoppage were the points of either contention afterward or the lessons learned that maybe prevented us from having it until now? That's an interesting point about lessons learned, because this is, after all, the FAA, and having worked for them for many years, I've always thought that they were a little slow on the lessons learned part. But again, I think that when we had that nationwide ground stop for the NOTAMs issue three years back or whatever, we kind of realized that it was something about the... It was something related to an update to the software that some technician had initiated somewhere that set the whole system into chaos. We don't know that right now. So I think that's what really worries me is the fact that this could be a very long evening. And like I said, when they start getting these airplanes to the gates, we don't even have old roller stairs anymore for airplanes that don't have... We're already past the 90-minute point, and it's already spinning pretty tightly. Robert, I want our control room to punch up the flight aware map we've been looking at as well. Because we, you know, as we talk about the hundreds, thousands, millions of people impacted by this, there's 7,000 flights delayed or canceled. When you look at this map, what is the first thing that goes through your mind when we think about the number of people impacted, the number of airports impacted? Well, think. 7,000 flights. Imagine for a minute that each flight had 150 people on it. I mean, you do the math. You're probably better at it than I am. I'll use my calculator. Hold on. Go on. That's many, many tens of thousands of people. And again, right now, I'm not even thinking about getting them back up in the air. I'm thinking about These people have been on the airplane for who knows how long, maybe a couple of hours. It's dinner time here in the Midwest. Thank you very much. They're probably getting a little hungry. Maybe somebody wants to get up to use the bathroom. room. It's going to make people really cranky. And right now, I can't even see how they're going to get all these people off the airplane right now. And so forget... When you're going to get to Las Vegas or Orlando or anything else. So I think we're going to watch this problem kind of grow as the evening goes on. And I mean, thank God it's November and not August or July when this is happening. Because I also think about AC and just the fuel and the fact of how much fuel costs right now. All of those things adding up by the minute right now, too. Well, of course, those are adding up anyway. I mean, those planes are still out there. I'm sure they've either, well, at this point, they've probably. Shut both engines down and are working off the auxiliary power unit. It's not burning near as much fuel as the engines are. But again, everybody is sitting there saying, okay, what do we do now? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And captain looks at the first officer or the first officer looks at the captain or the lead flight attendant comes up and says, hey boss, what are we doing? And everybody is sitting there saying, we don't know at this point. And that is probably the worst answer you can hear when you're sitting in the back of an airplane saying, but I wanted to go to L.A. to see my daughter because she's, you know, there's a special thing tonight or whatever. And they say, we're not going. We don't know when we're going. We don't even know when we're going to move. I can't. I can tell you that as a corporate pilot where we just kind of went and whenever we needed to go to wherever we needed to go, there's nothing worse for us than sitting in the back end of an airliner. Because we know that things like this can happen and they're extremely frustrating to us too. Yeah, I mean, not everybody is going for a great cause like, I mean, yeah, maybe Maybe somebody was trying to get to like a bachelorette or a, you know, yeah, that kind of baby shower. Maybe somebody was trying to get to a funeral, you know, or maybe somebody was trying to get to their loved one before they took their, you know, I mean, these are life situations that people would immediately try to get on a plane for as well, that you're sitting now on a runway with. You know, many thoughts on as well. Listen, it has been so great to talk to you, Rob Mark. Thank you so much for your time and sharing your expertise with us. We couldn't do it without you. So thank you so much. Happy to help. I'm here if you need me.