WASHINGTON — Democrats are demanding answers about Friday’s temporary ground stoppage on all flights in the United States and the apparent communications issue that affected air traffic control centers.
The ground stop crippled air travel and raised a variety of questions about the nation’s aging air traffic control systems.
In an interview on Friday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) said the FAA telecommunications outage was completely unacceptable and that the agency needs to create systems that do not have a single point of failure.
“I urge the FAA and the Trump administration to make sure this never happens again,” he said.
The California congressman said there need to be congressional hearings on the cause of the technical issue and what improvements should be enacted to avoid similar future outages.
“What just happened is enormously damaging to trust in our air system,” he said, “and our air system is a vital component of our national economy.”
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), the ranking Democrat on the Aviation, Space and Innovation Subcommittee, said she will be demanding answers from the FAA about the ground stop.
“The safety of our skies is built on redundancies,” she said in a statement. “Whatever led to the nationwide ground stop will warrant a thorough and complete investigation.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont)—who was stranded at Denver International Airport because of the outage—told CNN that lawmakers were waiting to be briefed by the Trump administration Friday afternoon.
Earlier in the day, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that it was a telecommunications outage and that the ground stop did not constitute a national security threat.
“There is no indication that we’ve had, no reason to believe, that as of right now this was a threat to the United States,” Mullin told reporters at the White House, later repeating there was “no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us.”
While the outage has not been linked to a specific cause yet, federal officials are not yet ruling out the possibility that it could be tied to the use of an AI tool that advises air traffic controllers to assist in managing air traffic across the nation’s airspace.
The FAA expanded the use of the tool to all of its 22 control centers on Tuesday, according to the agency. The tool—called Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART—combines about 200 data streams, including flight paths, schedules and weather, on one cloud-based system, according to a fact sheet posted on the FAA’s website.
Congressional Democrats raised concerns after the platform’s initial roll-out in the Washington area, calling for a 90-day pause until they better understand how it is being used. In a letter to Secretary Duffy, lawmakers said there was an “egregious lack of transparency” about the tool.”
“The air traffic control systems and processes currently in place are complex, and we don’t know what impact AI-enabled tools might have on these systems and resulting safety,” they wrote in October.
But in a post on social media Friday afternoon, the AI company that created SMART, Air Space Intelligence, said that “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.”