A ground stop and equipment outage that led to the cancellation and delay of hundreds of flights at DFW International and Love Field airports Friday evening was caused by “multiple failures” of technology provided by a Dallas-based internet provider, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
“Yesterday’s disruption was caused by multiple failures of the TDMI data telecommunications service provided by Frontier — a local telecommunications company,” the FAA said in a statement to The Dallas Morning News.
“This then led to an outage impacting the FAA’s Dallas TRACON facility.” A TRACON facility is an FAA control center that provides services to aircraft as they approach and depart airports, according to air safety website Skybrary. The centers manage air traffic within a 30 to 50 mile radius and up to an altitude of 10,000 feet, the website said.
Operations at both DFW Airport and Love Field have returned to normal levels, according to the FAA, with the agency adding it is working with airlines on recovery plans for impacted flights.
Love Field is the home base of Southwest Airlines, which operates 18 of the airport’s 20 gates. Fort Worth-based American Airlines operates its central hub out of DFW.
Between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Friday, only nine American flights were able to depart DFW airport, David Seymour, the carrier’s chief operating officer, said in a letter to staff on Saturday. Seymour said American usually departs around 100 flights per hour from DFW.
“At no time during these system outages in the DFW metroplex was the safety of our aircraft, crew or customers compromised,” he said. “The FAA’s quick response to these outages ensured that positive operational control was always maintained.”
In total, more than 530 American flights were canceled Friday and another 160 on Saturday, according to Seymour. American is determining the financial impact of the outage, he said.
As of 2 p.m. Saturday, DFW Airport had 251 delays and 155 cancellations, while Love Field had 46 delays and no cancellations, according to FlightAware data.
However, Friday’s outage hit fliers hard. There were 607 delays and 510 cancellations at DFW and 224 delays and one cancellation at Love Field, according to FlightAware.
FAA officials said that aerospace and defense company L3Harris, an FAA contractor, “failed to ensure that redundancies in the system functioned properly.”
“This is a clear example of the FAA’s outdated infrastructure and underscores the urgent need to modernize our air traffic control systems,” the statement said. “It also highlights the critical importance of clearing thousands of state and local permitting obstacles, which will delay modernization efforts by years. Moving from aging, analog systems to more resilient, digital technology, is critical to maintaining the reliability and resiliency of the national airspace system.”
Friday’s outage in Dallas mimicked similar air traffic control outages that occurred earlier this year near Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. In May, a 90-second technology outage at a Philadelphia air-traffic control facility took out radar and communications, according a Wall Street Journal report. That outage came less than two weeks after a similar outage that affected air-traffic controllers at Newark in late April.
Earlier this year, Sean Duffy, the U.S. Transportation Secretary, released a plan to overhaul the country’s air traffic control system. His department said the FAA plans to replace infrastructure such as radar, software, hardware and telecommunications networks in order to match modern travel.
He emphasized the plan in a social media post regarding the Dallas-area outage.
“This is EXACTLY why @POTUS and I are hard at work to build a brand new air traffic control system,“ Duffy said on X. ”We will make disruptions like these a thing of the past.”
Source link
