Ask Lemmy

Fucking poorly implementing a shitty AI system that should not be running anything let alone Air Traffic

Republicans only know how to break things.

Because it's a nation of incompetents, ruled by incompetents, who are now trying to force incompetent ai into positions demanding competence.

And yet all these planes are in the air. No problem.

https://ews.kylemcdonald.net/

There's no official word, but to add some context, the FAA deployed a new AI-powered computer system for air traffic control yesterday.

Again, no proof that that's what's going on. But it sure is interesting.

I just now read regional traffic control centers, which link all the others, got overloaded with data traffic because the FAA communication system is a patchwork mess - multiple generations of new tech integrated with old legacy systems and each other over a long span of time. That kind of setup can be nursed and prodded along for years by dedicated maintainers, but at some point the upside-down Slurpee cup that's been holding up one end of the shelf crumples and everything falls on the floor.

IMO theyre keeping it under wraps for one of these reasons:

• it was an attack and they dont want panic
• it was yet another huge failure of "ai" bullshit and they can't upset shareholders any longer so need to keep secret
• it was floppies

We never had these kinds of outages before they got rid of DEI.

Olivia Rinaldi was claiming over on Twitter that the FAA did an update to their telecommunications equipment, which caused a reboot. However when the system rebooted it immediately crashed. So since their communications are borked they just grounded everything.

Is it true? No idea.

My hot take:

We all know Trump has dementia.

So he just walked out in the evening and boarded a plane, not knowing where to. The others didn't see him leaving, so they didn't know either.

When he messaged to his folks that he is going to take off in a minute, they grounded everything immediately, just to be sure.

Then it took them only 4 hours because they are the world's smartest ones.

Just in case.

I was on a flight when everything was grounded. I asked the pilot and he could neither confirm nor deny that it’s aliens.

My connecting flight was cancelled so I split a $600 Uber with four strangers

My theory: Trump Admin hired someone incompetent and they fucked up the comms. I mean that just the theme of trump admins basically

The actual advisory from the FAA is:

ATCSCC Advisory
ATCSCC 111 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONAL GROUND STOP
MESSAGE:  	

EVENT TIME: 13/2053 - 14/0400
DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY.
ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION
COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING
TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND
INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS. 

EFFECTIVE TIME:  	132054 - 140430
SIGNATURE:  	26/11/13 20:54  

Source: https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/oisedit/adv_oisedit_dis?number=111&day=11132026&gdp=-1&gstop=196093

Beyond that, all I've seen so far is:

Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, says Trump administration officials blamed a telecommunication outage but said they did not know its cause and that it would “take some time” to fix the issues grounding flights.

per NYT's reporting: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/11/13/us/ground-stop-nationwide-flights-faa/d2ae2ce1-ac6b-59ad-ad8d-daef4e181b34

Edit (longer quote further down from Mullin):

Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, blamed the ground stop on a telecommunication outage but said Trump administration officials did not know the cause, adding that it would take an extended period of time to fix the issues. “This isn’t going to just be resolved and turned around within the hour,” he said. “This is going to take some time.”

Outlook and Teams outage /s

My brother is an ATC. He didn'y have any more info yet, but I'll update this comment when he knows more.

Edit: Just had dinner with him and he didn't have any official info. He did say that

1. He didn't buy the official story of there being a communication issue between airports. It just doesn't make sense based on how those communications networks function (sorry wish I had more detail here. he went into copper wire laid in the 1960s and how it's different than just the public Internet.) But they wouldn't ground crop dusters and planes flying VFR out of small airports if it were a communication issue.

2. The AI rollout that has been in the news also very likely has nothing to do with it. Absolutely NO controllers have been breifed on any new systems, so it's likely just something to grab a headline from the Trump administration.

It was his day off but his work called twice while we were at dinner trying to get him to come in.