US FAA says error messages in telecommunications circuit prompted shift to backup before outage

The major telecom failure paralysed traffic along the East Coast for hours and disrupted thousands of flights on Sept 21.

WASHINGTON – The head of the US Federal Aviation Administration said a series of error messages in a telecommunications circuit prompted the agency on Sept 20 to switch to a backup fibre line before an outage snarled thousands of flights along the East Coast.

The FAA said its contractor L3Harris advised they wanted to switch to the backup on Sept 20 to begin troubleshooting of the circuit at a Philadelphia air traffic control facility before a New Jersey Transit contractor on Sept 21 accidentally cut the backup fibre line near New Brunswick, New Jersey.

L3Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Congress approved US$12.5 billion (S$16 billion) to reform air traffic control in 2025, but the project has taken on new urgency since the major telecom failure paralysed traffic along the East Coast for hours and disrupted thousands of flights.

On Sept 21, about 9,500 US flights were delayed or cancelled after the FAA was forced to halt flights for hours to airports in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington.

This forced a halt to incoming flights at major airports on the day that 130 world leaders and dozens of ministers were arriving in New York for the annual high-level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

“We need to get rid of the old system,” FAA administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters at an event in Washington on Sept 23.

“When it fails, we just don’t have the redundancy that we would get if we had a modern architecture.”

Bedford said he thinks the upgrade will cost US$27 billion in total. Including money from other accounts, Congress needs to approve another US$10.5 billion for the project.

The FAA needs a modern telecom system on an existing network like Verizon or AT&T, Bedford said.

Replacing outdated copper wires with fibre is expected to be completed by September 2027 but will not be enough to prevent future outages, Bedford said.

They did not have enough money to address the need for a new telecom system in the first phase of the project “which probably might have been a bad decision”, Bedford said. REUTERS