‘Extremely frustrating’: Aviation experts explain why system worked and didn’t work in ground stop

Training and backup plans kept airline passengers safe when a communications system meltdown Friday caused a nationwide ground stop, but it shouldn’t have happened, aviation experts say.

“The key now, certainly forensically, is to find out what happened. How do you prevent it from happening again, and how resilient is the system?” Allied Pilots Association spokesman Dennis Tajer said. The APA represents American Airlines pilots.

The longtime pilot was headed back to his Arlington Heights home Friday from Newark International Airport but his flight was canceled along with thousands of others, causing massive headaches for travelers.

“And let us all say an early Thanksgiving ‘thank you’ that it didn’t happen next week,” Tajer added Saturday, as he waited in New Jersey. The holiday surge is expected to start Nov. 20.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday that issues surfaced when a contractor was upgrading wiring in the telecommunications system. It’s unclear if the contractor was at fault or a router, said Duffy who also called on Congress to deliver billions more to modernize aviation infrastructure.

“With compatibility issues, it’s always been a thing with the Federal Aviation Administration, trying to integrate the new and the old (systems) while they’re still trying to replace the old,” former air traffic controller Tim Kiefer said.

“This is all part of this attempt to basically fix the airplane while it’s flying,” added Keifer, who worked at the O’Hare tower and Chicago Center in Aurora and is now an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Both Tajer and Keifer agreed the ground stop was necessary.

“I know there’s been some criticism that potentially there was some overreaction because some facilities did have communication, but until they figured out what the bug was, for lack of a better term, they wanted to stop everything. The last thing you want is ‘OK, we’re working fine,’ but in a second they could not be working fine,” Keifer said.

“If they’re going to err on side of caution, we stand with them,” Tajer commented.

The technical problems caused intermittent communications and radar gaps at Air Route Traffic Control Centers, which handle high-altitude flights, officials said.

How did that play out in cockpits and at Air Route Traffic Control Centers, including Chicago Center?

“We train for lost communications all the time. It’s not the end of the world and it creates a lot of complexity but it doesn’t create an unsafe environment,” Tajer said.

“It’s also important to note that in addition to our procedures and training for lost communications, every airliner has its own radar for weather avoidance and a system that displays other airplanes and their altitudes, so we can avoid (problems) should the ATC system degrade,” he noted.

Keifer explained that controllers normally work with multiple backup systems to reach aircraft.

Those were all affected but controllers could contact cockpits intermittently Friday. But “instead of one transmission per aircraft, it was five transmissions for the same transmission.”

“The reason (the FAA) did the ground stop was they did not want to add any more airplanes to the problem, until they figured out the problem,” Keifer said.

But for the air traffic controllers troubleshooting, the situation was “extremely frustrating,” he added. “When you’re talking to an airplane, your brain is already five moves ahead.”

Underfunding has plagued the nation’s air system for years, Keifer said, adding when he started at Chicago Center in 2002, the technology used dated back to the 1980s.

For controllers, “it’s like giving them a screwdriver when they need a hammer. But they’re making it work with the screwdriver.”

Daily Herald wire services contributed to this report.

mpyke@dailyherald.com