The Single Router in Southern Arkansas That Ground Air Travel to a Halt

A data overload on an antiquated FAA network resulted in stalled trips for hundreds of thousands of travelers

The Federal Aviation Administration first noticed glitches in communications at its Indianapolis center that oversees high-altitude flights over a swath of middle America.

Quickly they spilled into communications between pilots and air-traffic control. There was static and interruptions. Pilots had questions.

Initially FAA employees tasked with troubleshooting the problem—one that wound up grounding much of U.S. travel—started their hunt in Indianapolis, according to people familiar with the situation.

But then, they zeroed in on two locations: an FAA radio site in El Dorado, Ark.; and a radar site in Amarillo, Texas, the people said.

Network gear at the Arkansas site, and possibly the one in Texas, overloaded the communications system that thousands of air-traffic controllers use to guide pilots through the nation’s airspace.

“We saw two places that were actually pinging our network at a very high rate, a thousand connections over every four to five seconds,” Rebecca Guy, the FAA’s technology chief, said at a Saturday press conference.

These pings traversed a tangle of copper wires and fiber-optic cables that feed into the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure, or FTI. The decades-old system is outdated and undergoing a multibillion-dollar upgrade to move into the fiber-optic age.

Defense contractor L3Harris Technologies oversees the system, which includes key connections for radar, communications and flight data. “L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on...”

A search for the location of this El Dorado Ark site returned with

33°15’22.2”N 92°44’38.2”W

It all happened on Friday the 13th, when the ‘Ebenezer’ movie came out.

Cemetery or Baptist Church?

https://maps.app.goo.gl/fgnNVAcZkhq12RFG7

Street view:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/jDzVfF3uWDjH4CWr7

What is that, a sombrero?

This explanation defies common sense. The FAA requires redundant systems and backups on planes. Businesses have multiple routers that can bypass in case of failure. Hard drives use Raid to avoid a single point of failure.

So, one faulty router brings the entire US system down?

My working theory is the system needed to come down for security reasons, maybe to do a system wide update that required the entire system to be down.

I also think its connected to the microsoft being down.

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