Makes sense. CNN reported that international airlines were still departing for North Atlantic flights, apparently because they use a separate communications system.

I saw one!

Source?

Sec of Homeland Security gave an interview about 10 minutes ago saying it's indefinite, they don't know the cause, and to expect resolution to take a while.

> When will we congratulate all the AI companies for this?

5 days from now? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50465829

I actually got out surprisingly on time at 10:30am. The other airport at landing was chaos though.

I'd be quicker to assume that the problem is within. AI related or not.

You need to go outside, take a walk and then have a hot chocolate.

All is well, this is not the AIpocalypse. Just some dude fucking up something stupid, as usual.

Update before I can no longer edit:

> The Federal Aviation Administration told airlines the nationwide outages that prompted the ground stop were the result of a problem with network routers, according to an airline source.

> The problem is believed to have started at Chicago Midway International Airport and cascaded nationwide.

> A spokeswoman for the military’s Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, said there was no evidence yet that the telecommunication outage was the result of any nefarious action by domestic or foreign actors.

NYT: "In a social media post on Friday, the company [ASI] said, 'The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.'"

Wait, the FAA wants to own a portion of the company? As in, the government believes it had the authority to own the means of production?

Is this more common than I realize in US executive deparyments and agencies?

The whole setup is worrisome.

It would be super awesome if I could hop on an airplane without getting my insides x-rayed, my belongs sorted through or damaged, worrying about the windows falling off or the plane's systems flying itself into a crash, or some tech bros' bid to be a billionaire telling what an understaffed ATC controller what to do.

We can use Chinese models? (I am referring to the LLMs).

Personally I fail to understand how we could possibly benefit from a non-deterministic AI system, when normal computer systems are more than capable of managing a 3-dimensional airspace using nothing but basic math. Smells like pork for sure :/

Curious where the people are who said AI will be doing x in y months (for their valuations) - it never will. Where are they hiding?

Sure, but the tool needs to get information from the communication systems, and if it's badly written maybe it could overload some system components.

That's just a scenario off the top of my head, it could be a lot of stuff. Plugging something new into an old, complicated system isn't risk free.

That would make me feel better if we could trust a damn word from this administration and I wasn’t on a plane waiting to land.

If only routes didn't affect air safety.

Until it got out of its sandbox…

If it's working correctly, anyway

Well done.

Has anyone in the history of government estimated that for anything?

That seems like pretty important context actually, and is a surprise to me.

Seems like there are three plausible causes right now given the extremely limited communication from the govt.

1. The AI system rolled out yesterday had more access than publicly claimed and managed to break things.

2. The ongoing large scale equipment upgrade went wrong.

3. General incompetence from a department run by an unqualified realty show actor, within an administration that is actively hostile to expertise and experience in the federal workforce.

I don't see why they would care about the NATCA's evaluation of the system. As a union, they have a vested interest in protecting the employment of traffic flight controller workers more than public safety.

Smacks of: I built a fully functional MVP now just need a co-founder to sell it.

Perhaps it's using the same communications channels and has overwhelmed them?

> That system just makes suggestions and isn't actually integrated in any ATC system. This is a telecom issue.

Is there any evidence for this beyond a single statement from the govt? This administration hasn't exactly developed a reputation for fully accurate and truthful reporting.

They may both be equally well-suited for the job...

I'd take it ad an indication of the cause.

I guess it depends on what is actually going on. And nobody really seems to know that right now apart from the shit having hit the fan.

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If you haven’t seen it, there’s an exhibit about 9/11 at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in DC that shows the airspace in the lead up to and just after the attacks. If you find the traffic changes now interesting, I think you’ll find that interesting as well. It’s possible it’s online if you do some googling

Now under 8k

FL400. 40 AGL is doable for almost all airliners ;)

I saw several flights taking off actually. Like this one from EWR. https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=394a08

I live in the general area of you too. Nice to know that there are Detroiters on here.

It could be the flights that are heading directly away from US airspace over the atlantic to free airport space for other planes?

My view on ADSBexchange is centered on CMH, zoomed out to Washington D.C. to the east, and filtered by 18K up I've got 142 aircraft.

This tracks with what I has seem elsewhere. I don't have the details handy now, but the communication system used for long range handoffs for flights above 18,000 ft seems to be what is impacted. Keeping planes below that deck would keep them bouncing more frequently between shorter range towers but at least still tracked and in communication.

Why

13/2053

?

Holy french.

Oh nice, very helpful. The sibling thread mentions that this problem is specific to "ARTCCs", which are not the towers at airports but rather central hubs:

  Between the sectors administered by [smaller towers] are 20 contiguous areas of US airspace above 18,000 feet, each managed by an Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC)...
  A flight is handed off from one Center to another until it descends near its destination, when control is transferred to the TRACON serving the destination, and ultimately to the tower controller serving the airport.

Wikipedia mentions they in particular use special "very high frequency aviation bands" (around "AM 118-137 MHz"), which is presumably why they're all linked together. It also mentions sharing systems, but no clear specifics that I can find. Certainly doesn't disprove the botched rollout theory, tho...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_control_center

EDIT: someone below posted this, seems relevant -- the 'Radar multiplexer pipeline' that's on a "fast track" and an "aggressive track": https://www.sunhillo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SUN3125-... TL;DR: upgrading radio systems from old analog tech to new digital tech, I think?

For anyone who doesn’t want to click through, there are problems with “frequencies”. Something must be jamming up the airways… but nationwide??

Same here, I get it only on some refreshes, otherwise it shows "no advisories". I hope that's not the main path these things are disseminated normally.

This sounds like the beginning of a good story.

Hypothesizing that today’s big tech outage may be related to the big tech outage that was less than 24 hours ago is natural and sensible.

Agreed. I would apply this further; stop letting 1970s and 1980s pop culture fads consume our attention; let go of Star Wars and Marvel etc etc; previous centuries headlines

Let go of software dev; as is a mechanical task from the 60s-70s

Cultural memory begets cultural conservatism

God forbid the news cycle slow down enough for society to process events rather than being continuously forcefed the next thing in the outrage cycle.

This is why there's such an issue with holding power to account nowadays.

Amazing quote.

I wrote about this four days ago:

"Realistically you want fewer, higher-quality engineers who are educated in these tools and treat them with respect and caution. These tools are dangerous and you can’t play around. All it takes is one mistake and the blast radius is way, way larger. One mistake can do so much damage it undos all value of an entire year. Before downloading a malicious dependency was limited to deterministic behavior and could be scanned for. Now, you run a MCP server locally, it can prompt inject (in many different ways), and now your super powerful AI buddy is hacking you in ways a deterministic piece of malware could never. You could cripple entire companies through negligent use." And "And now we are controlling models that can be hacked in so many different ways and literally blow up companies. It used to be accountability the software wouldn’t break. Now it’s accountability that in creating the software we don’t ruin the business."

Not saying this was caused by malicious actors or negligent AI agent usage nor am I saying was the previous Microsoft outage either the above references but it doesn't look great. If our technology is really so brittle, we might be looking at a return to way slower world to put it simply. Maybe no remote work because it gets hacked too easy!

Computers are machines used to amplify human error.

I’ve seen figures that estimate the aviation industry to provide about $1.5 trillion worth of GDP for America, so 4-5 billion dollars. Feel free to double that for the cost of dealing with unexpected disruptions and loss of institutional trust.

Wouldn't that have been taken into account when the $12.5 billion was allocated? Or was the $12.5 billion just meant to be the first allocation and they knew substantially more would be need later?

A century? Since 1926? The FAA was created in 1958.

I'm hearing some discourse about "outdated infrastructure" and increasing investment because most systems are analog and not digital.

However, this failure mode seems more likely to be caused by digital communication systems and an 'upgrade' (with commercial incentives) to newer technology.

My bet is that if short-wave radio transmission keeps being used, availability will be higher than stuff like Github.

The DOGE/OMB rampage didn't help either.

Snark aside, this is actual advice in Crisis Engineering by Nitze, Weaver, and Dickerson, and largely matches my experiences as well. You can harp on and on and on at upper management about why budget or attention needs to be allocated to take care of something before it blows up into a much bigger problem, but they'll never move on it -- until it actually does blow up, and then suddenly you've got nearly a blank check to do whatever's necessary to make sure it never happens again.

If you don't take full advantage of that, you're missing out on possibly your only opportunity ever to fix whatever's needed fixing for years.

> first reaction

The FAA et al. have been working to modernize US ATC since ~2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transporta...

The next step is a ton of hardware upgrading, which always costs real money.

When the system is held together with chewing gum and 1980s-era software, when it fails, "someone screws up" is not a fair reaction. Of course it fails! The wonder is that it still mostly works.

Should probably have waited 48 hours for the news cycle to move on and ensure absolutely nobody knows the money is needed

They asked for the money before the crisis which makes the timing even MORE conspiracy coded somehow

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Now we’ve been deplaned and they are going to return checked baggage to us

Yeah but imagine the guy who took that offer a couple of hours later. He was the real winner.

On a domestic flight that just landed normally, FWIW.

Secretary of Homeland Security just assured a press conference that all planes in the air will be dealt with on a case by case basis. Some may be prioritised.

I hear Newfoundland is lovely this time of year

You are enroute ? Good thing Starlink still works.

No we were about to push off at DET when the grounding came in.