Posted by zulln 3 hours ago
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-natio...
“Generally considered,” really? Does that apply anywhere outside of r/conspiracy?
After 1962 there was too much air travel to continue to shut it down for exercises, and NORAD switched to smaller, regional level things that did not shut down air travel after that. But the results of Sky Shield III in 1962 were the only experience that the FAA had to work from when they did the full ground stop after September 11th. Sky Shield III had tested how quickly air traffic control could clear the sky in the event of a nuclear war- the USAF had put up several hundred T-33 trainers, flying them randomly around the US and Canada, and then at a certain point in the exercise the ATC had to get them all on the ground far away from major metropolitan centers (presumed lost in the war).
Update: Starship launched on schedule.
edit: #121 does load eventually:
https://www.fly.faa.gov/adv/adv_otherdis?adv_date=11132026&a...
The Most Recent ATCSCC Advisory
ATCSCC ADVZY 121 DCC 11/13/2026 REROUTE CANCELLATION
MESSAGE: FC A001:STARSHIP_WEST HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
REMARKS: CANCELS ADVZY 036.
ASSOCIATED RESTRICTIONS:
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132305-140040
SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 23:05I guess if some plane needs to do an emergency detour threw threw that space, but that seems unlikely.
I'm sure there is a reason for it but can they not be a little bit more specific?
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/a-calamity-disrupting-hundr...
"we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline, now with software containing a near-infinite amount of lines of code generated by LLMs, to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."
And everybody here on HN applauds.
https://www.sunhillo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SUN3125-... (page 3, bottom graphic)
(all the radars --> multiplexer [sadness here] --> radar data consumers)
Attention: National Radar Outage
Flight Service uses a different set of radios and can relay messages to ATC, but they've been slowly dismantled over the last two decades and wouldn't have the capacity to step in for an outage (nor should they be expected to - that's not their purpose).
Some aircraft have CPDLC for text-based communication, but it's asynchronous and you can't use that as a replacement for voice communication in the terminal environment. Also, many aircraft aren't equipped to receive it.
Pilots are trained on lost comms procedures, so if you're in the air and the radio fails they'd fall back to those regulations. Basically all the aircraft would fly their last assigned clearance, and attempt to deconflict manually with other aircraft over air-to-air radio (similar to flying into an untowered airport).
There are contingencies for radio outages, but yeah, everything going down at once (if that's what's happening here, which I doubt) is bad.
So it falls back to local control, more in the style of visual flight rules. Pilots in existing flights will have to be vigilant and do their own deconflictation and new flights are banned out until the network is back up.
All conjecture at this stage of course, but all the radios won't just fail. It is probably going to be a poster child example about the dangers of large scale integration. The attraction of course is that integration is very efficient, the danger is it tends to fail all at once instead of in smaller pieces.
VFR traffic doesn't necessarily need radio, and is not affected by this groundstop.
As for lack of radio, this would only work if ATC blocked out your entire route from start to finish - which isn't practically ever done. Otherwise, they need to be able to maintain positive control over your flight since the airspace isn't reserved, which means conflicts are possible.
If you lose radio communication, it's an emergency and they'll move everyone out of your way. This doesn't work very well if everyone loses radio communication simultaneously.
Could you in an emergency, if you had no other options? Yes. But ATC can't legally give you a clearance that was dependent on using ADS-B for separation.
(Similarly, if there's a potential traffic conflict, and you tell ATC you see the other traffic on your ADS-B display, they just have to disregard that statement and assume that you can't see the other aircraft at all.)
I would hope that airports keep a battery operated radio + antenna in case of emergency with them, to at least communicate with aircraft within visual range of the airport.
I believe it's all virtualized today
I did a tour of Adelaide airport with Engineers Australia in the 1990s. We visited their obsolete IBM main frame, still running ATC in their computer room. They were tied to it by the certification of the software it was running. Just as you described.
Like if you're ordering a pizza they don't need the story of your day, why you chose pepperoni, or what movie you plan to watch. Somebody else might be interested, but not the pizza guy.
> The Weather Service “has not experienced a disruption to its radar systems today,” said Kim Doster, the spokeswoman.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-natio...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-national-weather-servi...
I am watching planes stacked up on final approach to land at KBOS as I type. From flight radar 24 they are a mix of foreign and domestic. So incoming flights are clearly being managed here.
Does this imply some potential risk from inbound international air traffic? Or maybe the FAA meant outbound? Something else I am missing?
(Sure, a flight near the Canadian or Mexican border could in theory divert to a Canadian or Mexican airport, but it's unlikely many people on those flights have their passports with them.)
In which case freezing domestic (and the huge amount of load it contributes to ATC) but keeping international normal makes sense.
Of course... the side effect is the "fun" that creates for incoming international flights with domestic connections...
There must be some procedures in place for this - I pretty regularly take domestic (Canadian) flights that pass over the US where I don't carry my passport.
Flight EY8 from Boston to Abu Dhabi https://fr24.com/ETD6PX/429055e2
The intent around the ground stop is to reduce in-air U.S. traffic.
As for asking already airborne flights to turn around, those coming in over the ocean might simply not have a non-US alternate airport available with their fuel remaining, so that's often not an option.
Oceanic flights are planned so that at every point along the route, the aircraft can lose an engine or cabin pressure and still reach a pre-approved diversion airport with enough fuel, with the flight plan marking the points where turning back versus continuing becomes the faster option. If a diversion is needed mid-ocean, the crew offsets from their assigned track and altitude to stay clear of other traffic, then heads to the nearest suitable airport, such as Gander, Keflavik or Shannon over the Atlantic, or Anchorage, Cold Bay or Midway over the Pacific.
Alternate airports are picked based with regards to all kinds of contingencies (many of them meteorological), but "the US closes literally every airport" is not one of them.
So my guess this is what it means "case by case". Some which are close to destination would be manually routed, others will land in different places.
Depending on the nature of the disruption it may be they simply have drastically reduced capacity to handle traffic so landings may be much slower and they'll manage the traffic based on various priorities.
[0]https://gizmodo.com/the-faa-is-rolling-out-its-ai-air-traffi...
> [The] FAA also says a D.C.-based team of experts validates findings before they’re ever passed on to air traffic control, and the controllers retain the final decision on whether to accept SMART’s suggestions.
Seems unlikely.
There used to be a lot of invisible gatekeepers in a pre-AI world. At work, everyone can ask their agent to query SQL on databases that they were supposed to use through an application. The application and the security by obscurity(end users didn't know how to connect to the DB nor did they know SQL) were the gate keepers.
And the early reports describe the issue as related to ATC communication infrastructure.
Under the hypothesis that some under-reviewed AI generated code made it into prod, the situation could be qualified as "engineers are panicking, because they don't know if they are the cause or not"
Is it something else?
(i.e. Unloading to tarmac, buses)
https://www.news9.com/oklahoma-city-news/national-weather-se...
This article is very likely misreporting the US National Weather Service radar outage page you can find people reposting elsewhere in this comment section. The NWS page has been updated to say it does not reflect a current issue. Anecdotally, my local NWS weather radar is working fine. Also, weather doppler radar and ATC "radar" are very, very different technologies.
Given that the FAA issue also apparently relates to communications, it does seem like it might be related.
EDIT: Time line doesn’t add up for this. Likely unrelated