WASHINGTON, September 24 — The Federal Aviation Administration is running America’s airspace on telecom architecture four decades old, and this week the technical reality caught up with it. Thousands of flights across the densely populated Northeast were delayed or cancelled on Monday, September 21, after a circuit failed at a Philadelphia air traffic facility and, separately, a construction crew accidentally cut a fiber-optic cable near New Brunswick, New Jersey. Two failures, neither exotic, and the region’s flight schedule came apart.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put the problem plainly on Tuesday. “The architecture of our telecom is still a 40-year-old architecture, which means you could have a switch go down and a line be cut yesterday and the Northeast goes down,” he said.
He wants another $30 billion to complete upgrades and fix facilities, on top of the $12.5 billion Congress approved last year to modernize air traffic control systems.
Compaq machines and eBay parts
The FAA has been forced to use 3D printing or to go to eBay for replacement parts for some of its aging systems. In other cases, it can no longer get spare parts at all. The Government Accountability Office said in 2024 that the FAA needed to take “urgent action” to address aging air traffic control systems, noting that one-third are unsustainable.
The detail that matters is not any single failure but the absence of redundancy. The FAA’s more than 300 air traffic facilities cannot talk to one another and operate on individual analog computers.
“Every facility is a silo,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told Reuters in a recent interview. “We’re behind 20 years.” He said effectively the FAA’s towers are run on individual Compaq computers; the brand, which was acquired by HP, stopped producing computers in 2013. The FAA still has aging telephone systems and three telecom systems that are not interoperable and have a “clunky connection” that often forces delays, Bedford said.
This is not a new pattern. In January 2023, all flights departing the US were grounded for the first time since the September 11, 2001 attacks after a contractor accidentally deleted computer files, affecting a key pilot messaging database; the outage disrupted 11,000 flights before the issue was solved.
In September 2025, more than 2,000 flights were delayed and hundreds cancelled at two Dallas-area airports due to a telecom outage after a contractor cut fiber lines, impacting communication systems at the Dallas airports; it disrupted flights for 100,000 American Airlines passengers alone.
The 2027 switch
One big step is expected in late 2027, when air traffic control will move from analog to digital communications. The FAA will later shift all of the facilities. Until then, the US operates the world’s most complex airspace with a shortage of several thousand air traffic controllers and a patchwork of systems that turn a single severed cable into regional chaos.
“These incidents will continue to happen unless we get the resources and actually build the architecture fit for the 21st century,” Duffy said. Britain, as ever, offers a cautionary parallel: it has suffered major air traffic control outages this month that have led airlines to question the resilience of its systems.
Watch the funding fight and the 2027 digital transition — the two levers that decide whether the next cut cable is a nuisance or another grounded Northeast.
