Officials blame a communications outage for the nationwide ground stop, not the FAA's AI tool
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FAA grounds all U.S. flights days after expanding its AI air traffic system
On a typical Friday November evening, millions of passengers would be hopping on flights for pre-Thanksgiving weekend trips and journeys home after work. But today on November 13, domestic and international flights throughout the U.S. completely ground to a halt at about 4 P.M. EST. The Federal
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FAA launched new AI air traffic tool three days before national ground stop
Why did the FAA ground all flights? Officials are still investigating. Credit: Kevin Carter / Contributor / Kevin Carter via Getty Images For only the third time in U.S. history, the Federal Aviation Administration(FAA) has issued a nationwide ground stop of all flights. U.S. Secretary of
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Entire US Airspace Shut Down Days After the FAA Rolled Out an AI Air Traffic Tool. Was It a Coincidence?
Mere days after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) dramatically expanded the use of an AI air traffic control tool nationwide, the agency issued an extremely rare ground stop for all flights in the entire country this afternoon. Secretary of transportation Sean Duffy tweeted that the ground
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This Week, the FAA Rolled Out AI Air Traffic Management. Then It Grounded Flights Nationwide
A four-hour FAA groundstop isn't just an inconvenience. For a lot of people, it's an uncomfortable coincidence. There are few things worse than a delayed flight. Not only are you not traveling to where you're supposed to go, but you're stuck in an airport waiting for your flight to leave. Unless,
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AI company behind FAA's SMART tool denies link to ground stop, Duffy confirms
Air Space Intelligence (ASI), the company behind a recently deployed Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) AI tool, denied any link to the nationwide ground stop issued Friday afternoon. "The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration
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FAA launched a new AI air traffic tool days before flights were grounded across the US: What is the new tool and was it behind the ground stop?
On November 13, the nation's air traffic came to a halt when a telecommunication outage struck regional hubs. While the FAA insisted there was no indication of malicious intent, the fallout included the cancellation of over 1,000 flights and significant delays for countless passengers. Notably, the
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The FAA stopped all US flights for about four hours on November 13, three days after expanding its AI traffic tool SMART nationwide. Officials blame overloaded routers, but the AI question stays open.
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered every flight in the United States to halt on Friday, November 13, a nationwide ground stop issued around 4 p.m. Eastern time and lifted roughly four hours later
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.Routers overloaded with data
It was only the third nationwide ground stop in US history, after the September 11 attacks and a 90-minute outage of the pilot-notice system in January 2023
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. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the stop on X, citing a communication problem affecting all of the country's Air Route Traffic Control Centers3
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. At a White House briefing after airspace reopened around 8:15 p.m., he gave the most specific account yet: "Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down"5
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Source: Futurism
The disruption was large. Per Reuters, more than 1,000 flights were cancelled and about 10,000 delayed; another outlet counted more than 2,000 affected
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Source: Scientific American
A new tool, three days earlier
What turned a technical failure into a national story was the calendar. Three days before the stop, on November 10, the agency expanded SMART, its Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories system, to all 22 air traffic centers nationwide
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. It had been in testing in the Washington area since late September2
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. The system cost $875 million2
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Source: The Hill
The tool is cloud-based, pulling together roughly 200 data streams, from weather to staffing, to predict traffic conflicts and recommend route changes. It advises controllers, who review its suggestions; it does not fly planes
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. The agency said it would cut delays and fuel use by predicting problems before they happen2
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. By its own count, it had rerouted 180 flights in the Washington area, trimming each by 10 minutes and 80 gallons of fuel2
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.The rollout already had critics. The controllers' union reportedly was not involved in designing or testing the system, and Democrats have asked the Government Accountability Office to review the tool's safety risk management
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Denials, and one open question
The company that built the tool, Air Space Intelligence, disclaimed responsibility while the stop was still in effect: "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"
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. Duffy went further at the briefing: "This is completely disconnected... this is not even plugged in. So, there's no possible way SMART would have impacted"5
. Microsoft also denied any of its services were involved6
.Social media users flagged the timing coincidence almost immediately, and a reporter's question drew the acknowledgment on live television
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. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the stop came from a telecommunications outage, not a security threat, and there was no sign of foul play2
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. The telecom infrastructure where the failure occurred is managed by the defense contractor L3Harris, which did not immediately comment1
.Asked directly whether the tool could have played a role, Mullin said he could not rule anything out yet. "You can't rule out anything at this point. We are going through that process and we're going to find out what happened," he said
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. Agencies were still investigating what caused the outage2
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