After the nation’s air traffic control system came to a grinding halt this week, leaving millions of people stranded at airports with cancelled flights and expensive hotel stays, the White House finally responded. However, far from offering any stability, the response was a masterclass in the late stages of Trumpism.
Speaking in an interview, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin began his briefing with a joke about “Friday the 13th”. The comment was bizarre, to say the least, to people whose children were crying and elderly family members were in wheelchairs. However, he quickly moved on to the administrations favourite talking point: How brilliant the president is. “This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like,” Mullin claimed that the chaos showed how well the team can handle crises.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stood next to him and tried to justify the situation. He said it was due to a “1980s jalopy” system and demanded $50 billion from Congress immediately. This seems like a lot to ask for from an administration who are part of a party who just had control of the country. While he spoke about Trump being a “builder” and expressing his frustration with the bureaucracy, his actions on the ground were more about him shouting “All is well!” in a manner reminiscent of Animal House.
However, the most obvious thing about the whole situation was:
President Trump, who made his political career out of being the best communicator, was completely missing. With people scrambling to get their flights sorted, Trump was still stuck inside the White House. There was no live speech to the nation, no news report and no empathy towards the citizens who were affected.
Instead of the President, the public were left with mouthpieces. Instead of transparency, there was wind-up. While Mullin and Duffy discussed Trump’s greatness in the briefing room, with Stephen Miller observing, Trump remained in a secluded room.
Eventually the travel issues will be resolved but the Great Grounding has shown how out of touch the White House is with politics. They would rather stay in their bubble and not try and reassure a frustrated nation. The Builder fell silent.
Legacy Systems, Modern Disaster: Why a Single Router Brought Down U.S. Airspace and Left the FAA Defense-Less
November 14, 2026
Between 3:54pm and 8:15pm ET on 13th November 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) deployed a rare ground stop across the entire country. This was the second time it had occurred since September 11 2001, and was caused by a minor NOTAM system meltdown in early 2023. Although the alertness of air traffic controllers meant the 3,500 aircraft in the sky were not put at risk, the ground stop resulted in the cancellation of 9,159 flights and 7,190 delays on Friday. By Saturday morning, another 3,800 flights were cancelled.
Transport Secretary Sean Duffy was quick to reassure the public that no evidence was found of any cyberattack. However, an issue occurred with the IT system during an upgrade of the infrastructure. One router was responsible for connecting old copper telecommunication lines from the 1980s to modern fibre optic infrastructure. This particular router started to spam the old air traffic control switches with over 1,000 connection requests every 4/5 seconds. This caused instability within the data.
Eventually the faulty hardware was isolated. But,
For airline executives, logistics analysts and infrastructure experts, this raises the question of why the FAA was caught off guard by an issue that should never have happened due to the nature of the network.
The Anatomy of an Avoidable Meltdown
From a business and engineering perspective, the issues encountered on Friday highlight some major vulnerabilities within the national infrastructure. Upgrading copper to fibre infrastructure is a common and predictable IT process within the global telecommunications industry. However, the FAA did not have the basic fail-safes in place to isolate any issues within the hardware.
“In high-stakes enterprise IT—let alone mission-critical civil aviation—you design networks around the assumption that hardware will fail, rogue signals will occur, and legacy components will choke.” If one router was causing a buffer overflow of connection loops it should have isolated itself. However, instead it caused instability in the regional centres nationwide. This is an issue with the infrastructure, said Dr Aris Thorne, Senior Network Infrastructure Analyst.
The three main issues within the FAA’s modernisation are:
Dangerous Legacy Systems: The FAA have been running on various legacy systems for decades. Connecting the 1980s copper lines to fibre infrastructure can cause friction within the hardware. They did not expect the switches to cause issues when overloaded with digital noise.
Poor Stress Testing: An upgrade of this scale should have been tested in a sandbox environment. This would have highlighted any catastrophic failures including huge connection overloads. This shows the FAA did not do enough testing before upgrading.
No Isolation: If the regional network integration failed it should never have caused a nationwide failure. The ground stop was put in place as a precaution due to the lack of trust controllers had in the data. This highlights how they didn’t have any firewalls in place.
Millions Lost Due to Airline Chaos
Although the FAA did what they could to keep the planes in the sky safe, the airline industry suffered catastrophic losses.
Major hubs such as Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta, Chicago O’Hare and JFK New York were severely impacted as they were going into a busy weekend. Thousands of flight crews were out of position, planes were stuck at the wrong gates and airlines incurred hundreds of millions of pounds in extra costs due to passengers needing to be rebooked, hotel vouchers and overtime.
As the airline industry is a very tight margin industry, an unexpected 4 hour blackout will cause massive disruption that can take up to 4 days to get back on track.
“The FAA effectively shifted the cost of its technical failure onto private carriers and the traveling public.” Whilst safety is a must, using cautionary ground stops as your main safety is not the way to run a national economy due to the IT grid not being able to cope with a rogue router, said Mark Richards, Aviation Economist.
A Culture of Reactive IT
This is not the first time the FAA have caused chaos in the national transport network due to their outdated IT infrastructure. Following the NOTAM outage in January 2023, Congress and industry leaders called for the FAA to make major changes, speed up funding and completely revamp their software and hardware.
However, after 3 years, the FAA have clearly not changed from their reactive approach.
Transport Secretary Duffy and the FAA will definitely be questioned heavily by the congress. They will want to know why a simple copper to fibre upgrade did not have strict fail-safes in place and why they were surprised by a simple overload in the hardware.
While airlines strive to facilitate passenger movement, the business community is left in shock upon realizing that despite billions spent on upgrading America’s airspace, our air traffic system is dangerously fragile and susceptible to disruption by a single box of wires.
