Yesterday I traveled cross-country on what may have been the worst travel day for the air traffic control system in recent memory. Yesterday (Monday, Sept 21) a major air traffic control outage hit the Northeast. What happened was an air traffic control communications failure in Philadelphia forcing the FAA to restrict arrivals at several major airports, affecting JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, Philadelphia International, and Teterboro. Ground stops began at Newark, Teterboro and Philadelphia around 10:00 local time, with JFK and LaGuardia affected later; by roughly 3:00pm, JFK and LaGuardia had moved to ground delay programs while restrictions continued at Newark and Teterboro. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility lost its primary communications circuit. The root cause: the problems began with a blown circuit at the FAA’s air traffic control facility in Philadelphia, which also handles traffic at Newark and when controllers tried to switch to backup, both the aging circuit and its backup system failed. Then the effects rippled out as United slashed flights out of Newark, and the outage left passengers stranded for hours, complicating travel for visitors headed to this week’s UN General Assembly (a very big, traffic congestion time in NYC as all residents know). By evening it was all pretty much resolved. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the broken telecom lines had been repaired and airport operations were resuming, though he warned it would take time to clear the backlog of delays. Notably, this same Philadelphia facility was also behind communications outages that disrupted Newark flights back in 2025, so this is a recurring vulnerability, despite Congress having approved $12.5 billion last year to modernize US air traffic control infrastructure.
Timing of yesterday’s problem was almost comically bad given that the FAA officially launched its AI overhaul on the same Monday the Philadelphia outage hit. That system, called SMART (Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories), is an $875 million software overhaul, rolling out first at three major airports serving the Washington, D.C. region. It was built by Air Space Intelligence, a relatively small company that previously built AI-enhanced dispatch software for Alaska Airlines (my new favorite carrier that I flew on yesterday) and other carriers. This is a much bigger, higher-profile test for them. The idea behind it is that it factors in all planned airline flights plus weather, wind, and other variables, then tweaks flight schedules to reduce congestion before conflicts happen. Not for nothing, but I was surprised to see that my 2:20pm departing flight was rescheduled at the last minute to depart at 2:15pm…can they do that??? Well, they did it and we arrived at JFK a full half hour earlier than originally planned. I’ll bet that was all part of the big redo. It’s all part of a broader $12.5 billion push to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system, a system that set the tone for the world in air traffic control.
Air traffic control has a fairly clean origin story, and yes… the US played the founding role that much of the rest of the world then adapted. In the early years, before any formal system existed, pilots just looked out the window and hoped for the best. The first steps toward control came in the 1920s when Airmail pilots and early airports used light signals, flags, and eventually two-way radio to manage takeoffs and landings, but that was only at the airport itself, not en route. Then in 1929 Cleveland Municipal Airport built the first airport traffic control tower in the US, using colored flags and light guns. In the 1930s the first en route air traffic control centers emerged, strangely enough, not from the government, but from the airlines themselves. In 1935, several airlines jointly set up a center at Newark to track flights along airways using maps, blackboards, and radio position reports (the famous “shrimp boat” markers pushed across a table). Similar centers followed in Chicago and Cleveland in 1936. then, that same year the federal government (the Bureau of Air Commerce) took over these centers, marking the birth of a national, government-run ATC system. That was all decades before most countries had anything comparable. In 1938 the Civil Aeronautics Authority was created, consolidating aviation regulation and ATC. In 1958 the Federal Aviation Act created the FAA (originally the Federal Aviation Agency), giving one agency authority over all US airspace, civilian and military. In the 1960s–70s it was all radar-based tracking, the en route computer system, and the structure of Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs) matured into roughly the system still used today.
The U.S. basically set the global standard for ATC. The UN’s aviation body, founded in 1944, drew heavily on US and UK practice when it set international standards for airspace classification, separation rules, and radio phraseology. English became the international standard language for ATC communication largely because the US and UK were the earliest and largest aviation powers. The sheer scale of US airspace is such that it still handles by far the most flights of any single country. This meant American practices (sectorization, the ARTCC model, instrument approach procedures) became reference points other countries built on. Europe developed its own parallel and in some ways more unified approach through Eurocontrol (founded 1960), and countries like the UK, France, and Germany were innovating alongside the US rather than simply copying it. So “set the standard” is fair for the foundational architecture and the ICAO framework, but it wasn’t a one-way export, it was more that the US got there first and biggest, and everyone else converged around broadly compatible rules through ICAO rather than adopting a literal US blueprint. The wrinkle relevant to yesterday’s outage is that this same postwar-era system (an analog, radar-and-radio backbone built up over 70+ years and patched rather than replaced), is exactly what FAA administrator Bryan Bedford was pointing to when he said the equipment failure “underscored the need to replace outdated infrastructure.”
The FAA and DOT leaders are explicit that this new system isn’t meant to replace human controllers, but rather it’s a tool meant to reduce congestion and conflicts before they arise, with controllers still in charge of keeping planes separated. The irony of yesterday’s outage is that the blown circuit and severed backup fiber “upstaged” the SMART launch, and the FAA administrator himself used it to underscore the need to replace the outdated infrastructure. So the day meant to showcase the future of ATC ended up illustrating exactly why the system needs fixing in the first place.
I was actually unaware of any of this stuff when I raced out of JFK Terminal 8 to my Uber (by the way… easiest JFK terminal to get to your Uber). Then, since I was heading to my hotel downtown, we got on the Belt Parkway and did the usual tour of the entire Brooklyn waterfront and through the Battery Tunnel. That all went as planned until we got to Maiden Lane (right next to the vaunted New York Fed). We were 250 ft. From my hotel and wham! Two garbage trucks kept us waiting for 15 minutes while they loaded up all the downtown garbage of the day. There was nowhere to do and nothing to do, so I just eventually hopped out and walked up the street for the final stretch. Let’s get AI working on that one.