(A)Political - November 14th

Good morning everyone,

Hope you didn’t fly yesterday! Let’s jump in!

Airlines are still canceling flights after Friday’s nationwide ground stop, and the administration is asking Congress for $50 billion. The White House says Trump will meet Xi and Putin together Thursday, though Beijing hasn’t confirmed it. The Supreme Court will decide whether Trump can bar people who cross the southern border from seeking asylum.

• Air Traffic Failure Behind Longest Ground Stop Since 9/11 Sets Off A $50 Billion Fight With Congress

• Trump To Meet Xi & Putin In Shenzhen To Discuss Nuclear Cuts

• SCOTUS To Decide Trump’s Asylum Power At The Southern Border

Air Traffic Failure Behind Longest Ground Stop Since 9/11 Sets Off A $50 Billion Fight With Congress

_{By: Atlas}

Airlines canceled thousands more flights Saturday as they worked to recover from Friday’s nationwide ground stop, the longest halt to U.S. air travel since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In a preliminary account, the Trump administration blamed aging air traffic control equipment, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy used a White House briefing to demand that Congress pay for a $50 billion overhaul.

The flight-tracking site FlightAware counted more than 3,000 U.S. cancellations Saturday as of 5:45 a.m. ET (4:45 a.m. CST), with close to 1,000 more delayed. Airlines were moving spare planes and crews to reposition aircraft that had been diverted or stranded, and some college football games were moved to Sunday.

How the shutdown unfolded

Duffy said the trouble began at 3:36 p.m. ET (2:36 p.m. CST) Friday, when air traffic control centers saw instability in their radar and communications systems. The FAA issued a ground stop for all U.S. airports after communication problems hit multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers.

Duffy said more than 3,500 planes were in the air when the decision was made to close the airspace. Controllers never completely lost radar or communications, he said, and every aircraft landed safely.

“When you have issues and you can’t immediately communicate and immediately see where aircraft are at, that’s a risk that we’re unwilling to tolerate,” he said.

Airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. ET (7:15 p.m. CST), more than four and a half hours after the problems began. Departures resumed slowly. By 11:30 p.m. ET (10:30 p.m. CST) Friday, nearly 10,000 flights had been canceled, according to Flightradar24 data. That included more than 2,200 each at Delta Air Lines and American Airlines and 1,800 at United Airlines. FlightAware counted about 9,000 U.S. cancellations Friday and noted that some were weather related. Some planes at major airports waited more than five hours for a gate, and tens of thousands of passengers were stranded.

What officials say went wrong

The administration’s account of the cause is preliminary, and the FAA has said its information is subject to change. Administration officials said new technology being added to the air traffic control system overloaded antiquated equipment, producing intermittent communications and radar gaps.

Duffy pointed to the system’s time-division multiplexing network, known as TDM, a dated technology that still runs largely on copper wire and carries controllers’ voice and radar data. He said switches and routers “got overloaded with data” and began producing inconsistent information, so the system was shut down.

“We have old, old switches, old routers, we use 1980s little copper lines,” Duffy said. He added that “all of the new equipment that we put in, none of that went down.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the outage happened while the FAA was carrying out upgrades. “That new equipment, new technology, it was overwhelming the older system,” he said. “The patchwork doesn’t work.”

Two airline officials said the failure appeared to involve a telecommunications network overseen by the contractor L3Harris Technologies, which handles radio frequencies controllers use to talk to pilots. L3Harris did not respond to a request for comment.

No sign of a cyberattack so far

Mullin said there was “zero evidence” so far that the outage resulted from a cyberattack or a “rogue AI” system. He said investigators had not ruled out either possibility and that the National Security Agency was working with his department on the investigation.

“It appears this was mechanically driven. However, we’re still looking,” Mullin said. Duffy said he and Mullin had met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss the outage.

Mullin also said the Federal Emergency Management Agency was mobilized to help make sure stranded passengers did not miss lifesaving medication.

The funding fight with Congress

Duffy used the briefing to press for money. He blamed Congress for failing to fund a new air traffic control system that he said could prevent such failures, and he called for $50 billion for a “complete overhaul.”

“This is an emergency,” Duffy said. “I want Congress to give us emergency funding. This is bipartisan. This is American. I want $50 billion.”

Earlier Friday, before the outage, the White House and the Transportation Department had urged Congress to approve $30.1 billion to upgrade the nation’s airports and air traffic control infrastructure. The ask rose by about $20 billion in the hours after the system failed.

Duffy said the FAA is already upgrading the system with $12.5 billion secured in the tax and spending law Trump signed last year, which the president calls the One Big Beautiful Bill. Without more money, he warned, “you will have more of these.”

The outage comes as the air traffic control system contends with old equipment, communications breakdowns and a shortage of several thousand controllers. Airline executives have complained for years about the cost of the resulting disruptions.

What it means for travelers

Because the FAA’s systems failed, and not the airlines, U.S. carriers are not required to compensate stranded passengers. Airlines offered travel waivers, and American Airlines said it was prioritizing international flights and routes to smaller cities to get planes and crews back in position.

Shares of American, United and Delta fell between 1% and 2% in after-hours trading Friday, while JetBlue Airways dropped about 3%.

The only other nationwide ground stop since the Sept. 11 attacks came in January 2023, when a key FAA computer system malfunctioned and the agency halted domestic departures for about 90 minutes.

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