US probes nationwide flights stoppage as travel disruptions persist

We turn now to the U.S., where air travel is expected to return to normal this Sunday following a nationwide ground stop Friday night that stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers and disrupted travel worldwide. The Trump administration blamed the incident on a botched replacement of old copper wire communication lines and said there was no evidence this was a cyber attack. The ground stopped now raising questions about the country's aging infrastructure as lawmakers call for an investigation into what caused the problem. Let's cross now to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where we can bring in our guest, Dr. Philip Mann, aviation expert and principal consultant at Vector Strategic Consulting. Philip, thank you so much for joining us today on the program. So the last time that the FAA issued a national ground stop, that was 9-11. So what were your thoughts when you first heard that this had happened? When I first heard this happened, it's important to recognize this is a ground stop, not a they just told aircraft that were on the ground to stay where they were. They didn't. Unlike what they did in 9-11, where they told all the aircraft to actually actively land as soon as you can, aircraft that were en route here were just allowed to continue. So they just told everybody to sit still and stay where they were. My immediate thought was kind of what happened, that this is some kind of a data problem. There was something in the system that was causing coordination problems with aircraft or awareness of aircraft, not that there was some kind of a nefarious thing going on with it. It was just some kind of catastrophic system because we've had similar. Larger regional kind of things, like when the notices to airmen system went out and they couldn't get clearances to pilots, there was a ground stop there for a while. But yeah, the 9-11 was the last time of anything this kind of a magnitude. And my concern was immediately looking at how is it going to affect the flights? How is it going to affect confidence going into the U.S. holiday weekend that's coming up next week? And how is that going to affect people's understanding of how safe air travel is? Now, Philip, at this point, you know, more details have been coming out. So it appears that if I understand this correctly, the issue was affecting communications between the air traffic controllers and pilots. So why was this so concerning? This is. What this was is a little refinement. This was affecting a lot of data traffic that included communications and radios, and it was over the wide, high-altitude areas, what they call the in-route centers, which is everything basically above 18,000 feet. And what this is concerning for is it makes it difficult for the center controllers, who might be located hundreds of miles from the aircraft, to actually communicate to them, because those radio signals have to go Through a data pathway, you're not too dissimilar from a technology we're using right now, then upwards to the air to the aircraft. Now, this didn't affect the local stuff. So the air traffic control tower that was located with its radios right next door, those weren't affected. They could use their radios and stuff just fine. But what it does is it it removes our ability to maintain system wide situational awareness. So we don't know necessarily what's going on. All the way across the national airspace system in a way that lets us pass that information to the facilities that need it right away. Now, Philip, in the press conference yesterday, the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, he blamed this on a faulty upgrade from copper wire to fiber optics and potentially human error with the contractor there that caused this cascading effect. So when you look at this, what does that tell you about the state of the infrastructure that controls our air traffic? Um, actually not, it doesn't inform me a whole lot about the state of the infrastructure, but I worked in the infrastructure for a long time and I'm kind of used to what it looks like. What this tells me more though, is about the, the way that the project managing this, the way that the facility is managing is actually manage their risk. Um, anytime, any type of work that has the potential to cause cascading delays or cascading faults, that work is normally done. After midnight, say between midnight and maybe six o'clock in the morning when air traffic is very low, when the potential impacts are very low, the numbers of effective air traffic are very small, very much fewer travelers. And this was done in the middle of the day during one of the highest traffic parts of the day. So that kind of tells me less about how the infrastructure is maintained versus how the technicians and project managers and stuff are aware of. The potential connections between what they're doing here and how that can cascade across the net, the national airspace system. And they're at least in this case, did not plan their work according to that understanding. Now, Secretary Duffy also said that the FAA needs 50 billion dollars in funds for modernization efforts. Shouldn't the government have sort of been funding these upgrades all along? What's the issue here and why are we still dealing with outdated connections? Yeah, that's a good question. And I think this really connects back to the airspace system in the United States being a victim of its own success. It has been understaffed and underfunded going clear back into the 1970s. And it's but it's been successful. It's the safest way to travel pretty much anywhere. Commercial aviation in the US is pretty much the safest way to travel. And because it is so successful and so safe. It essentially, there's no urgency to get funding and stuff through. Every few years, there's funding bills and things that come through. People want to modernize it, and there's just not an urgency behind putting that kind of money forward. And then add that to the idea that a lot of these projects, they're going to be multi-year, multi-decade projects, and a lot of administrations have historically, and the present one included, they want results. They want complete modernization in the next six months. Historically, it's taken 10, 20, 30 years to do any kind of significant modernization because when you're really doing the work, you really have to keep the airspace running. You can't just pull a system out, put a new system in, and try to figure out how to make it work. You actually have to keep the whole entire air traffic system working all the time. And that's And that's, that's. kind of what you see here, where they were doing some work not thinking about that. But in reality, when you're going to modernize the system, and this is where a good chunk of that $50 billion would go to oversight and would go to planning work, is because they have to consider how they're going to do it and how they're going to do it in such a way that it doesn't wind up shutting the whole system down again. Yes, yes. Thank you so much, Philip. We are going to have to leave it there. We're out of time in this news bulletin. That's Philip Mann, Dr. Philip Mann, aviation expert and principal consultant at Vector Strategic Consultant.