So what was the flight grounding thing all about? We still aren’t getting any real information from the regime. So I turned to WIRED:
On September 27, US transportation secretary Sean Duffy posted a video on X with the words “GAME CHANGER.” “Introducing ‘SMART’—the new air traffic management tool that saves YOU time, cuts back DELAYS, and makes your flying experience BETTER,” he wrote. This was a new AI-infused air traffic control system. Almost three weeks later, that post would get a new life, as a nervous joke, as the FAA issued a national groundstop on Friday the 13th that instantly threw the world’s airline schedules into chaos. The administration quickly announced that there was no evidence of a cyberattack, and no sign that SMART had anything to do with the communications failure at the heart of the government’s decision to suspend flights. But when asked on Friday night whether he could definitively rule out AI failure, Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin could only say, “There’s nothing certain right now.”
Today Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is saying the breakdown was caused by either bad equipment or an error as a contractor was replacing old copper telecommunications lines with fiber at a remote FAA facility. Duffy also insists that the failure was caused by the antiquated, legacy communications equipment, not recent upgrades to the system. But as the WIRED article documents, the aviation industry has been playing with AI, including pilotless planes, for a while now. Also:
In September, the FAA announced that it deployed software built by the Boston-based data company Air Space Intelligence. The new AI-powered tool is called “Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories,” or SMART, and it’s aimed at “fundamentally reshaping how we manage our airspace.” The program isn’t intended to replace controllers, the government says, but to make doing their jobs easier by using predictive AI to head off scheduling snags. “Combining SMART with our ongoing hardware upgrades gives us the tools to cut flight delays, optimize traffic, and keep airspace capacity across the country open—all while maintaining our gold standard of safety,” FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said in a press release.
The system is supposed to help controllers make decisions, not make those decisions for them. But if the program feeds nonsensical information into the system, will human operators be able to catch the mistake? “This is the Trump/DOGE/Musk effect,” says the recently retired FAA employee, who asked to remain anonymous. “They’re pushing through all this new technology without any understanding of the complexity of the national airspace system.”
Some lawmakers are also concerned about SMART. On October 13, almost two dozen Democratic lawmakers reportedly sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office asking it to review the program, citing fears that it might “hallucinate safety-critical information.”
The WIRED article is worth reading all the way through. Very informative. The bottom line, though is that people appear to be charging into use of AI technology without fully understanding how it works and what could go wrong. Duffy has no background in computer technology at all that I can find. He’s a lawyer who’s been on television a lot.
And of course it’s also the case that the aviation system has been needing an upgrade for a long time. No one disputes that. Congress has passed at least four major bills during the Biden and Trump administrations that appropriated billions of dollars toward upgrading the infrastructure, the copper wires and old computer systems and whatever. One suspects that should have been taken care of before throwing a lot of upgrades into the system.
And then there’s the Elon Musk connection. Musk and his DOGE operations laid off hundreds of FAA employees, including radar maintenance staff. Contrary to a lot of internet rumore Musk’s SpaceX did not take over the FAA. But the FAA has been utilizing SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service for elements of its network. If Starlink had anything to do with the grounding, however, we’ll never hear about it as long as Trump is president, I’m sure.
The day before the FAA meltdown, the New York Times published some articles about air traffic safety warning that the aviation system is vulnerable. See James Fallows, Is Air Travel Getting Less Safe? and Takeaways From the Times’s Report on Aviation Safety. I haven’t completely digested all this myself. But Fallows writes that Trump mostly left the FAA alone in his first term. But the second has been different.
Trump began tearing down the aviation safety net within hours of taking office, as part of the deregulatory blitz that had been foretold by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s detailed blueprint for dismantling the federal bureaucracy. Among the flurry of proclamations and executive orders that came forth from the White House that day was a short Department of Homeland Security memo, signed by the acting secretary, informing the members of its many advisory committees that they had all been terminated, in alignment with the department’s “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources.” Among those targets was an obscure-sounding group called the Aviation Security Advisory Committee.
ASAC was started back in 1989, in response to the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Originally this group was meant mainly to coordinate antiterrorism efforts. It was in the spirit of other cross-disciplinary groups set up after the Grand Canyon crash and other tragedies, all with the goal that critical safety information would be shared rather than remain siloed. Its advisory role had expanded over time, to cover not just onboard bombs but all aspects of flight security, from insider threats to baggage screening. After the firings, Kara Weipz, the president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, raised an immediate alarm. “Today’s action by the Trump administration will undermine aviation security in the United States and across the globe,” she said.
During his first term, a four-year period that was part of American aviation’s accident-free age, Trump and his team largely left expert bodies like this in place. But advisory committees were precisely the sort of bureaucracy he seemed determined to trim in his second term. Seven months after Trump’s D.H.S. shut down ASAC, his Department of Transportation similarly dismantled more than two dozen federal advisory committees, citing concerns that they had “been overrun with individuals whose sole focus is their radical D.E.I. and climate agenda.” Among them was the Research, Engineering and Development Advisory Committee, or REDAC, which works essentially as a review panel for major research and development projects.
Maybe if that Research, Engineering and Development Advisory Committee hadn’t been fired, whatever caused yesterday’s glitch wouldn’t have happened. Hmm.
I’m sure some more information will eventually trickle out, but of course any evidence that the Trump Administration was somehow culpable will be buried.
Update: Speaker Mike Johnson says no investigation into the “gounding” episode is needed. Of course not.