The FAA’s IT troubles are far bigger then AI

U.S. airlines are still reeling from a nationwide ground stop issued on Friday that interrupted weekend travel and wreaked havoc on schedules. The culprit, the Federal Aviation Administration says, was simply outdated tech.

The ground stop was followed by eager speculation on social media about what might have caused the issue. Some pointed a finger at a new AI system that the FAA integrated earlier in the week; others blamed foreign adversaries. At the same time, a range of tech companies that contract with the FAA, like Microsoft,were quick to distance themselves from the agency’s problems. 

Later Friday evening, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters the outage occurred after an old analog system called time-division multiplexing became overloaded. This is an arcane system of processing data signals over a network. The overload, in turn, impacted the telecommunications systems used by terminal radar approach controls, or TRACONs, the air traffic control facilities that help direct flights at airports. Duffy noted that systems that had already been upgraded based on internet protocols did not experience the outage. “This is all the old legacy equipment,” he said. “All of the new equipment that’s been deployed did not go down.”

Officials, at least for now, insist there’s no evidence anything nefarious happened. Instead, the Department of Transportation is, once again, begging Congress for more money to overhaul FAA tech. 

Duffy urged Congress to provide additional funding to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system, arguing that the issue should transcend partisan politics. He noted that the FAA had received $15 billion for modernization efforts over the past 25 years, with little to show for it. “It’s not red, it’s not blue, it’s not Democrat, it’s not Republican, it’s American,” he told reporters. “Give us the money to fix it.”

Indeed, the FAA’s tech problems are way bigger than AI. Instead, they have a lot more to do with the challenges of updating technology while it’s being used. 

The pilots guidance system is ancient and isn’t designed to handle upgrades

This isn’t the first time the FAA has experienced a major outage that’s brought flights across the country to a halt. Back in 2023, the Notice to Airmen system (NOTAM), which alerts pilots to potential hazards in American airspace, went offline after contractors accidentally deleted files, disrupting its core technology.

There’s been an effort to improve the NOTAM system, but it’s moving at a snail’s pace. The FAA has brought in private industry for help and engaged in an effort to modernize the system, but that process has only brought to light myriad other problems. For one, at least according to contract paperwork obtained last year, NOTAMs weren’t exclusively being stored in a virtual environment or in an entirely digital format. Another aspiration the FAA was working on, at least at the time: making sure that upgrades to some systems didn’t disrupt, well, all of air traffic control.

“Everyone will say, ‘Well, there’s backups in place,’” Shawn Pruchnicki, a former pilot who is a professor at Ohio State University’s Department of Aviation, told FedScoop at the time. “But we’ve also seen time and time again where those things have been said and things have gone horribly wrong.”

Poor AI rollout

Like a lot of other federal agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration has been inching toward deploying artificial intelligence for a host of applications. Back in 2023, the Department of Transportation, of which the FAA is part, said ChatGPT was being used for certain purposes, which the FAA said at the time was incorrect. Since then, though, the FAA has begun to embrace AI: An inventory of use cases released by the government references several uses, including AI-powered pilot voice transcription, systems for detecting drones, and meteorology.

But the FAA hasn’t been the best at communicating to the public how it plans to use AI safely, without becoming susceptible to the risks of the technology. 

Many people, early on, suspected that Friday’s outage might have been related to the SMART system, an AI-based airspace planning tool the agency introduced earlier in the week. The FAA explains that the tool is designed to “analyze airline schedules, weather, airport capacity, airspace conditions, and operational constraints to predict traffic flows and identify potential conflicts before they occur.” SMART doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with the ground stop, though. 

Bad wires and old hardware

The deficiency of the FAA’s timeworn infrastructure was on display in April 2025, when a burned copper wire triggered a communications blackout at Newark Liberty International Airport. For 90 seconds, air traffic controllers lost radar and radio contact with planes approaching one of the nation’s busiest airports. The incident triggered weeks of delays and cancellations. Another communications failure followed in May. 

Newark’s hiccup was the sign of an endemic problem: Some of the FAA’s copper wiring dates back to the 1960s, and according to a September 2026 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the FAA had replaced fewer than half of its aging copper wires, 2,560 out of 5,170.

And it’s not just wires. Back in 2007, the FAA began a technological overhaul known as NextGen, which aimed to reduce its reliance on ground-based radar in favor of satellite navigation and digital communications. Nearly two decades later, that effort remains unfinished, due in part to years of inadequate funding. Just earlier this month, the FAA proudly announced it had finally begun retiring floppy disks.

“What we’re doing is hard and it hasn’t happened in the past because it is hard. But I’ll tell you by doing nothing, you inject way more risk into the system,” Duffy said on Friday. “To use 1980s technology, 1990s software . . . 1970s radar that we don’t even make parts for anymore, to have an old network configuration from the 1980s versus re-networking the air traffic control system through the FAA, I believe that should be a priority,” he said.

The FAA’s tech is the problem no one wants to fix

Duffy came into office as transportation secretary promising to overhaul the FAA’s aging technology. In May 2025, he unveiled an ambitious plan to rebuild the nation’s air traffic control system by 2028 and replace critical infrastructure like radars and radios. Congress approved an initial $12.5 billion for the effort, but the price tag quickly jumped. Just two months later, Duffy told lawmakers that the full overhaul would cost an estimated $31.5 billion. Even his 2028 deadline comes with an asterisk. It covers only the first phase of modernization, with no timetable yet established for the second, which includes new software to track aircraft and manage air traffic. 

The GAO put it most damningly in its September 2026 report, writing that the FAA “doesn’t have a lifecycle cost estimate or master schedule for related projects,” which “could end up causing air traffic disruptions or prolonging reliance on severely outdated systems.” These tech problems only exacerbate the FAA’s other endemic challenges, including overworked air traffic control offices and a controller recruitment crisis.

Meanwhile, the $30 billion Modern Skies Act, sponsored by Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri and aiming to fund upgrades on everything from air traffic control software to airport terminals, has yet to advance out of committee. And on November 13, the White House asked Congress for another $30.1 billion for aviation infrastructure, including $10.1 billion for air traffic control technology.

When asked whether Americans could be sure that the issues seen Friday wouldn’t occur again, Duffy was blunt: “I can’t build things if I don’t have money.”