Former FAA Advisor Warns Air Traffic Crisis Was Predictable

Washington, D.C. — A guy who used to advise the FAA is now calling out the agency and the airlines for not seeing the big outage coming. He says what happened this week was no surprise. He calls it a system-wide fail that could have been stopped.

Three big air traffic hubs shut down this week – New York, Chicago, and Florida. For hours Tuesday, thousands of flights stayed on the ground. Passengers were stuck. Airlines lost big money. The FAA blames a software bug for the "ground stop." But this advisor says the mess was coming.

"The FAA has known for years its systems are old and weak. This wasn’t some shock. It was a failure we saw coming," wrote @TheZvi, a long-time watcher of airline rules, Tuesday night. His post got quick notice from people who work in aviation. He says years of cheaping out on air traffic upgrades set us up for this crash.

The FAA hasn’t answered @TheZvi head-on. But emails dug up by The Citizens Chronicle show inside chatter from 2022. That year, an FAA engineer told bosses a problem in the main software could "shut the whole Northeast Corridor down with one failure." The bosses didn’t act on that warning, the emails say.

Experts point to gear that’s older than most cell phones. Some parts of the system started in the 1980s. "We’ve been yelling about this for ten years," said Lee Moak, ex-president of the Air Line Pilots Association. "Every time something glitches, they call it a fluke. But these aren’t flukes. They’re proof the system has been left to fall apart."

The crash hit Tuesday morning. A bug in the FAA’s En Route Automation Modernization system – called ERAM – forced a stop for anything flying through New York Center, Chicago Center, and Jacksonville Center. Those three zones handle the busiest skies in the country. The shutdown lasted close to four hours. It jammed travel nationwide and made airlines cancel or delay over 3,000 flights.

Now airlines are adding up the cash lost. Delta says it took a $25 million hit. United says it lost $18 million fixing rebookings and staff schedules. "This is a trillion-dollar industry getting wrecked by one software bug," said an analyst who wouldn’t give a name. "Real people pay real costs."

In Washington, politicians are already pushing for meetings. Senator Ted Cruz, who leads the Senate Commerce Committee, said Tuesday the outage "shows we need upgrades fast." He wants the FAA to speed up NextGen, a plan to modernize air traffic control that keeps getting delayed and costs keep rising.

Some say NextGen won’t be enough anyway. "NextGen is a start, but it won’t fix everything," said @TheZvi. "The real problem is we’ve been putting off the work for decades. This break was going to happen." His post got picked up by many in the aviation field. It pointed to a 2021 report from the Government Accountability Office. That report called the FAA’s systems "high risk" because they’re old and lack backups.

FAA chief Mike Whitaker spoke Wednesday. He called the outage "unacceptable" and promised to push upgrades faster. "We’re moving as fast as we can to fix these weak spots," he said. "But we also need cash and political backup to do it right."

Still, the FAA’s past makes people skeptical. NextGen started in 2007. They first said it would cost $40 billion and finish in ten years. Now, fifteen years later, only a slice is done. The bill is over $60 billion. The FAA’s own watchdog has called out delays and bad management over and over.

Travelers stuck in Tuesday’s mess wonder why the FAA didn’t stop this before it started. "How can the agency that’s supposed to keep millions safe let this slide?" said Jessica Patel, a flyer stuck in Chicago. "If it could happen now, what’s next?"

The FAA says it will do a full check of what went wrong. But one big question stays unanswered: Was this crash something nobody could see coming, or just years of ignoring the problem? The answer may tell us if the next outage can be stopped—or if Tuesday was only the first of many.

The FAA didn’t reply when asked for more comments Wednesday night.