Aviation Update

At peak hour, over 13,000 commercial aircraft are in the air simultaneously over the United States alone — and a single ATC system failure can cascade into delays affecting every one of them.

The FAA's NOTAM system failure in January 2023 grounded all US domestic departures for approximately 90 minutes — the first nationwide ground stop since 9/11. Investigation found the outage was caused by a corrupted database file that a contractor had accidentally overwritten during routine maintenance. Over 11,000 flights were delayed.

The FAA operates on a patchwork of technology systems, some dating to the 1970s. The NextGen modernization program, launched in 2007, was supposed to replace radar with GPS-based ADS-B by 2025. As of 2025, radar is still the primary separation tool for most US airspace.

Should the US government treat its air traffic control infrastructure with the same urgency as national defense — or is the current patched system adequate as long as it mostly works?