
Air traffic controllers and their families rally at the United States Capitol during the October 2013 government shutdown. Their signs warn: “Real people, real consequences.”
November 14, 2026 Gary Wilson
Venture capitalists and Pentagon contractors are rebuilding the air traffic system of the United States on their own timetable. The workers who run it objected and were ignored. On Nov. 13, the whole country saw what that means.
At 3:54 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, Nov. 13, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered every airport in the United States to stop departures. Radar data and radio communications had turned unreliable at all 22 of the en route centers that handle high-altitude traffic between airports. More than 3,500 planes were in the air. The ground stop lasted 4 hours and 21 minutes, the longest since Sept. 11, 2001. Airlines canceled more than 9,000 flights that day and more than 5,000 more on Nov. 14, with planes and crews stranded in the wrong cities.
A new story every day
At the White House on the evening of Nov. 13, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed old equipment. Switches and routers running on 1980s copper lines, he said, were “overloaded with data.” None of the new equipment installed under the Trump administration had failed, he insisted. Then he asked Congress for $50 billion, on top of the $12.5 billion already appropriated for a new air traffic control system.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, standing next to him, gave the game away. The FAA had been putting patches, new equipment and new technology into the system, Mullin said, and the new technology was “overwhelming the older system.” A reporter who contacted 60 air traffic controllers that night told CNN that “none of them are buying” Duffy’s account. Work of this kind, the controllers told her, is done midweek in the middle of the night, when few planes are flying, and not on a busy Friday afternoon.
The controllers were right. At a news conference at the Transportation Department the next day, Nov. 14, Duffy had a different story. A contractor, L3Harris, he said, had been replacing copper wire with fiber optic cable at a remote FAA site, work Duffy called routine maintenance. After the changeover, by his account, a router began flooding the FAA’s network with more than 1,000 connection attempts every few seconds, and the failure spread to every en route center in the country.
The second story is no more settled than the first. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, at the same news conference, said the agency has not found the root cause. Duffy could not say whether L3Harris installed the equipment wrong or installed a faulty router. Neither man explained how one router at one remote site could bring down all 22 centers. On Nov. 13 the fault lay with old equipment, and on Nov. 14 with a contractor. On neither day did it lie with the officials in charge.
The contractors own the network
L3Harris is a major Pentagon contractor that has held FAA contracts for decades. By Duffy’s own description, the company owns the old telecommunications network that links the air traffic facilities. That network connects more than 4,400 FAA sites and carries the traffic of 45,000 flights a day, by the company’s count. A system that guides every flight in the country runs on lines that belong to a private company. Whether or not Duffy’s account of Nov. 13 holds up, the officials in charge are pointing at a company the government itself put there.
They have pointed at it before. On Sept. 19, 2025, a telecommunications failure shut down both Dallas airports for hours. The FAA said then that L3Harris had failed to make sure the backup systems worked. Duffy answered by promising a brand new air traffic control system, and L3Harris kept the work.
Duffy now says he is “stuck” with L3Harris. His solution is the $50 billion, which he wants in order to bring in other companies. Whatever failed on Nov. 13, his answer is more contractors.
AI over the workers’ objections
The fiber upgrade is one part of the rebuilding of air traffic control. Artificial intelligence is another, and it is also in the hands of a private contractor. On Nov. 10, three days before the ground stop, the FAA announced that a new AI system, made by a different company, was now in use at all 22 en route centers.
The system is called SMART, for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories. It was built by Air Space Intelligence, a Boston company known as ASI, under a 12-year, $875 million contract awarded June 22. SMART pulls about 200 streams of live data — weather, flight paths, traffic volume, controller staffing — into one cloud platform and recommends changes to routes and schedules. It started up Sept. 21 in the crowded airspace around the three Washington-area airports. Seven weeks later it was in use across the country.
Officials say SMART had no part in the ground stop. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said on Nov. 14 that there is “zero evidence of anything AI-related,” and ASI says the same. These are the officials who, on the same day, could not say whether the fault was the installer or the router.
Whatever the investigation finds, SMART was put into service with no say from the workers who have to use it. On Oct. 9, 25 members of Congress wrote to Duffy and Bedford asking them to pause SMART. The letter relayed what aviation workers had been saying: The front-line safety workforce had “little to no input” into the system’s development, got little training, and in some cases learned of the deployment only days ahead or not at all. The letter asked how SMART would perform during an equipment outage.
The FAA never answered in public. On Nov. 10 it put SMART into use across the country. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, which represents the controllers, says it was not consulted on the design.
Why the rush
The government’s own auditors saw it coming. On Sept. 14, the Government Accountability Office reported that in its drive to replace the air traffic control system, the FAA was “buying delivery speed at the risk of cost uncertainty and potential disruptions.” The result, the auditors warned, could be more outages, more ground stops and safety incidents.
The contractors have their own reasons for speed. In December 2023, ASI was valued at about $300 million. On Oct. 20, four months after the FAA contract, it raised $325 million from investors at a valuation of $3 billion, ten times higher. The investors include Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and affiliates of Citadel Securities. ASI also sells to the United States Air Force and Army and calls itself an aerospace and defense company. Every control center added to SMART is a selling point for the next contract. A slow, careful rollout tested by the people who would have to use it is worth nothing to these investors.
The administration has its own reason to hurry. One of the data streams SMART takes in is controller staffing. In May, the FAA cut its staffing target for air traffic controllers by more than 2,000, crediting new staffing models and scheduling tools. The system has been short thousands of controllers for years. Software, and now AI, is the plan for running it with fewer.
That plan has a history. In August 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking controllers and broke their union, PATCO. They had struck over hours, short staffing, speedups and the stress of the job. Forty-five years later, the towers and centers are still short-handed, and the Trump administration’s answer is again to get by with fewer workers, this time by counting on AI to fill the gap.
Who decides?
Controllers have worked with outdated computers for decades, and they need better ones. The copper lines Duffy complains about are real, and they have to be replaced. What matters is who decides which technology goes in, how fast, who does the work and who checks it. Today that is Duffy, the contractors and the contractors’ investors.
After the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, the demand raised in the workers’ movement was to take the nuclear industry out of the hands of the monopolies and put it in the hands of the workers, and to shut it down until that was done. The same demand fits here. Halt the SMART rollout until controllers, FAA technicians, pilots and flight attendants have examined it through their own unions and have the power to stop it when it is not safe. Take air traffic technology away from the contractors and put it under the control of the workers who run the system, responsible to the communities that live under the flight paths and the millions who fly.
The force that can win it
A demand like this needs an organized force behind it, and that force exists. About 20,000 controllers and other aviation workers belong to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. The FAA’s own technicians are organized in the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. Pilots and flight attendants have their own unions.
These workers have already shown what they can do. In January 2019, a government shutdown had controllers working without pay for 35 days. The controllers’, pilots’ and flight attendants’ unions jointly warned that safety was at risk. On Jan. 25, a small number of controllers stayed home at two FAA facilities, and flights into LaGuardia Airport in New York stopped. The shutdown ended that day. Federal law bars these workers from striking, the same law Reagan used in 1981. Their power was felt anyway.
On Nov. 13, the controllers union’s official statement said only that controllers were on the job and that safety was the priority. Sixty controllers told a reporter they didn’t believe Duffy, and within a day they were proved right. On Nov. 14, union president Nick Daniels told Yahoo News that work that can knock out every radio frequency should be done when the fewest planes are in the sky, and that failures like this often happen when the safety reviews required before maintenance are skipped. The upgrade was underway on a Friday afternoon. But Daniels would not say whether L3Harris was at fault, and he said the union will keep working with the administration. Union officials move when the ranks push them. Controllers and technicians can demand that their unions say in public what the members are saying to each other.
There is an opening to do it. Duffy promises to hold people accountable, and his department is investigating its own contractors. Members of Congress asked the Government Accountability Office on Oct. 13 to review SMART, and hearings will follow. Left alone, these inquiries will be run behind closed doors by the officials who hired the contractors and bought their products. The unions can demand seats in the investigation, with their own experts chosen by the workers and paid for by the government, and full access to the Nov. 13 network logs, the L3Harris work orders and SMART itself. They can demand that the hearings be open. If the official report settles for blaming a router, labor can issue its own.
The unions would not be alone. Millions of passengers were stranded on Nov. 13, along with the baggage handlers, gate agents, cleaners and food workers whose shifts fell apart. Most of those passengers are workers too, and everyone who flies or works at an airport has the same stake as the controllers in a system run for safety and on no contractor’s schedule. Rallies at the airports alongside the hearings would put that weight behind the demand.
Workers have stopped this kind of thing before. When Airbus and Dassault pressed European regulators to let automation replace the second pilot in airliner cockpits, the pilots’ union fought it, and in 2025 the regulator shelved the plan.
Duffy promises more ground stops unless Congress hands over $50 billion for more contractors. On Nov. 13, controllers and pilots brought more than 3,500 planes down safely while the equipment failed around them. They are the ones who should decide what gets plugged in.
Via https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2026/11/14/profit-rush-grounds-every-plane-who-runs-the-skies/