Ask HN: Radar and radio failures at Dallas area airports
10 comments
·September 21, 2025toomuchtodo
ranger_danger
> “This is a clear example of the FAA’s outdated infrastructure and underscores the urgent need to modernize our air traffic control systems,” the agency said in its Sept. 20 update. “Moving from aging, analog systems to more resilient, digital technology, is critical to maintaining the reliability and resiliency of the national airspace system.”
Umm, what? How is a fiber cut an "aging, analog system"? They even admitted that there was supposed to be redundancy in place but the system did not work.
imoverclocked
It's not the fiber that's the problem. I mean, it is ... but that's not the analog part we are talking about.
ATC communications are still over two-way radio. It's like walkie-talkies but on aviation bands instead of citizen bands. There are digital communications in some cases but it's definitely not the baseline.
fishgoesblub
Oh you know, analog telephone wires, digital fibre, they're both wire shaped so they're the same.
burnt-resistor
Somebody completely forgot about high availability and redundancy.
pdonner
So far it appears the news is reporting a cyber attack in Europe that is affecting European boarding. The RADAR/RADIO (TRACON) thing in Texas and other major airports in the US. A cyber attack on Collins Aerospace and Frontier. And some blame pointing at L3Harris for inadequate failure recovery. Sounds like no one has a clue. I wonder if any of our security apparatus is still functioning enough to provide support to find the source of the problem.
JumpCrisscross
If only we had “a system that had no centralized switches and could operate even if many of its links and switching nodes had been destroyed” [1].
[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/articles/2018/paul-baran-and-the-o...
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daveguy
Yes, I'm distraught that a central point of failure has been exploited in the internet and now internet does not exist.
Anyone have any clue what the cause of this disruption was/is and if it's still going on?