Thousands of travellers are stranded in US airports after more than 15,000 US flights were delayed or cancelled on Friday following a telecommunications outage.
More flight cancellations are expected over the course of the next few days.
According to Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, the outage was caused by old air traffic control technology and overloaded routers. He also said that more outages are to be expected until the Congress acts on legislation to improve the system.
In a recent statement, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin pointed to Federal Aviation Administration FAA updates to the air traffic control system as the reason behind the nationwide ground stop. He said the FAA added new technology to the old system, causing the massive breakdown.
He also said that the ground stop was not caused by a threat to the US and dismissed reports that it was connected to the global Microsoft outage.
Last week, the FAA announced its plans to phase out the use of the now obsolete floppy disks that are still being used for weather and other critical information at air traffic control centres. The announcement showed how much US air traffic control still relies on outdated technology.
A floppy disk is a magnetic memory strip that can store up to 1.44 Mb of data. The technology is now considered obsolete, and they are no longer manufactured.
The new update system is to be introduced at more than 400 facilities by the end of 2028, CNN reported.
“What it appears to be right now is, as Secretary Duffy and FAA were going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment and new technology, and that new equipment, new technology… it was overwhelming the older system,” Mullin said on Friday.
It is not clear whether the phasing out of the floppy disks is directly connected to the outage. Mullin cited the failure of the patches as evidence that the FAA systems need a “complete overhaul."
A former FAA flight accident flight inspector, David Soucie, told CNN t that every project he worked on used custom digital software. However, some of the hardware he used in 1999 was built three decades earlier.
“Every time you introduce something new, you’re creating new vulnerabilities. So that’s my point now; seeing this happen illustrates that you can’t just simply start making new things,” he said.
