• Ground stops at US airports this Monday saw over 7,000 flights delayed or cancelled
• Affected airports in the US Northeast included Philadelphia International, Newark Liberty International, John F. Kennedy International, and LaGuardia
• The Airforwarders Association has called for the Federal Aviation Administration to implement recommendations from the United States Government Accountability Offices’s report to strengthen aviation communications resilience.

Ground stops at US airports on Monday have seen the industry association, the Airforwarders Asssociation (AfA) call on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to implement recommendations from the United States Goverment Accountability Office (GAO) report on strengthening US aviation communications resilience.

The call comes after ground stops and disruption at airports in the US Northeast on Monday, lasting for approximately seven hours. This was caused by an equipment outage at Philadelphia air traffic control and a cable to a back up system cut by construction  workers in New Jersey.

Affected airports included Philadelphia International, Newark Liberty International, John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia. The disruption led to over 7,000 flights being delayed or cancelled.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is reported by PBS to be asking the US Congress for US$20 billion more to pay for the next phase of the air traffic control overhaul following the incident.

While the GAO report primarily deals with cybersecurity and signal threats as opposed to the physical damage reported to have ocurred on Monday, the AfA is highlighting the gaps in protection of aviation communications systems to urge the FAA to address these concerns.

“The FAA has identified serious threats to critical aviation systems, but this report makes clear that it has not completed the basic risk assessments or built the monitoring needed to address them,” said Brandon Fried, Executive Director of the Airforwarders Association.

“That is not good enough when the threats facing aviation are becoming more sophisticated, and the consequences of failure can spread across airports, airlines, freight networks, and the wider economy.”

The GAO report found that the FAA had not completed risk and mitigation assessments for identified spectrum related threats, including spoofing and jamming, and lacked a defined capability to continuously monitor and detect such threats.

The three major New York airports affected by the outage handled more than 2.2 million tons of cargo last year, according to Port Authority data.

“While Monday’s disruption was not reported as a cyberattack, it showed how quickly problems with critical communications infrastructure can cascade across the aviation system,” continued Fried.

“We cannot afford to wait for a malicious actor to exploit a weakness before treating resilience as an urgent priority.”

The GAO issued nine recommendations covering risk management, threat monitoring, information sharing, authentication, and data protection, all of which the Department of Transportation has agreed with.

“The FAA now has a clear set of recommendations and no reason to wait, it must now close these gaps before they are exploited and invest in our aging infrastructure,” said Fried.

The AfA has committed to working with the Department of Transportation and the FAA to ensure the GAO’s recommendations are implemented in full.

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