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Travel Hell Continues: 1000s Still Stranded After Ground Stop As Duffy Demands $50 Billion: 'This Is An Emergency'

Tyler Durden's Photo
by Tyler Durden
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More than 3,000 flights within, into or out of the US had been canceled by Saturday morning, according to FlightAware, as airlines dug out from Friday's nationwide ground stop, which wiped out more than 9,100 flights that day and left tens of thousands of passengers stuck in airports overnight.

As we reported Friday night, the FAA lifted the stop at about 8:15 p.m. ET, roughly four hours after it halted every departure in the country. It was only the second nationwide ground stop since the September 11 attacks; the first came in January 2023, when the FAA's pilot-alert system failed.

"It's going to be slow," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters at the White House Friday night, warning that airlines would need time to get back to normal capacity and that some passengers would have to be rebooked.

"Nickel And Diming It"

Duffy said the trouble began at 3:36 p.m., when the FAA saw "instability for our radar and our communications" at centers across the country, according to the transcript of the briefing. "Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down," he said, adding that the FAA's new IP switches stayed up: "it's the old hardware that went down." Elsewhere in the briefing he said, "We use 1980s little copper lines."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin offered a less flattering version for the modernization effort itself: the new equipment the FAA has been bolting onto the network "was overwhelming the older system." Piecing the upgrade together, he said, is the problem: "nickel and diming it together does not work."

On Thursday, a day before the outage, Duffy and budget director Russ Vought sent appropriators a letter asking for $30.1 billion, Roll Call reported, a request that mirrors the Modern Skies Act Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) introduced in September; only $10.1 billion of that bill goes to air traffic control upgrades.

By Friday night the ask was $50 billion. "This is an emergency -- I want Congress to give us emergency funding," Duffy said. "I want $50 billion." Mullin put a "complete overhaul" at about the same figure. That is $19.9 billion more than the White House had put in writing the day before.

Congress already gave the FAA $12.5 billion in the July 2025 reconciliation law, which Duffy called partial funding. In January, as we noted, the FAA put the whole overhaul at "at least $32.5 billion" and Duffy was asking Congress for another $20 billion to finish it by the end of Trump's term. Thursday's letter alone, on top of the $12.5 billion, put the total at $42.6 billion, more than $10 billion above that estimate, before Friday's number pushed it higher still.

"We're Looking At That"

Mullin said investigators had found no sign of a cyberattack. "There's no chatter," he said. "We haven't seen any footprints, as you would say, or identifications of people that got into the system."

Asked whether the FAA's new AI traffic tool had anything to do with it, Mullin didn't rule it out:

Air Space Intelligence, the company behind the FAA's SMART traffic-planning system, said the ground stop was "not based on or a result of the SMART system" or of its integration with the FAA:

Mullin also said "the president has declared this a national emergency, and now we have to have Congress act and fund it."

In September, as we reported, a cut fiber line knocked out Philadelphia TRACON's radio frequencies and ground-stopped arrivals at Newark, JFK, LaGuardia and Philadelphia, and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the agency hadn't known the backup fiber was cut until the primary circuit failed.

On Capitol Hill, Senate Commerce Committee Republicans noted that Lyndon Johnson was president the last time one of the country's 22 air route traffic control centers was built. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who takes over the committee in January when Democrats take the Senate majority, said it will review how planes communicate on their primary frequencies, and the leaders of the House Transportation Committee, Reps. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) and Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), promised to "thoroughly review" what went wrong.

Duffy wants the money out of the lame-duck Congress: "We now have an opportunity in an emergency funding bill before the end of the year to give the money," he said, with Republicans running the Senate until January.

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