America’s Skies Went Dark — and Joe Biden Built That
Last night, the United States of America — the nation that invented powered flight — could not fly.
For more than four hours on Friday, the FAA ordered a nationwide ground stop. No departures. Anywhere. It began around 4 p.m. ET and was not lifted until about 8:19 p.m. ET. More than 15,000 flights were impacted, with more than 9,000 delayed, more than 6,000 canceled, and more than 600 diverted. It was the longest ground stop since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
No enemy did this to us. No storm did this to us. Our own government did this to us — with ancient equipment, decaying networks, and four years of criminal neglect under President Joe Biden and his transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said it plainly Friday night: outdated air traffic control technology caused the communications outage that forced the shutdown. The FAA first saw instability in its radar and communications systems at 3:36 p.m. ET. Switches and routers in an analog, legacy network got overloaded, started feeding controllers inconsistent data, and the only safe answer left was to empty the sky. Duffy described what this administration inherited: old switches, old routers, and 1980s copper lines.
Think about that. There were 3,500 airplanes in the air when this began. By 8 p.m., there were fewer than 400. America did not lose a war on Friday. America lost its own airspace to rot.
And make no mistake: this rot has a name, a party, and a record.
It was the Biden administration that presided over the January 2023 NOTAM failure, when the system that warns pilots of safety hazards collapsed and the FAA paused domestic departures nationwide for the first time since 9/11. That was supposed to be the wake-up call. It was supposed to be the moment Washington finally treated aviation modernization as the emergency it is.
What did Biden and Buttigieg do instead? They talked. They held hearings. They issued reports. They chased every fashionable priority in Washington while the literal machinery that keeps 45,000 flights a day from colliding was left running on legacy networks and decades-old hardware. Controllers were left short-staffed. Near misses piled up. Airlines, pilots, and controllers warned, again and again, that the system was brittle.
Friday night, brittle broke.
Nor was aviation the only basic function this administration let slip out of its hands. As Intel Daily has reported, Border Patrol arrests at the southern border averaged more than 1.8 million a year during the Biden years, peaking at 2.2 million — a record of lost control that has since fallen by more than 95%. Borders, airspace, the basics of governing: under Biden, the pattern was always the same. Announce priorities, neglect the machinery, act surprised when it fails.
And then, right on cue, Pete Buttigieg showed up to blame Trump.
Stranded in Denver — where he was attending a Democratic conference to game out the party’s 2028 presidential chances — Buttigieg rushed to push back, demand “answers” about the outage, and deliver the most shameless line of the night: “We did a lot to upgrade the system. When we had an outage, I didn’t stand there complaining about the Trump administration. We got to work.”
Spare us, Mr. Secretary. You were the outage. The last nationwide ground stop in America happened on your watch, in January 2023. As the New York Post put it, Buttigieg jumped at the opportunity to slam Friday’s ground stop despite being in charge when it last happened three years ago — and he apparently expects the country to have forgotten that fact by now. We have not.
Buttigieg’s defense is that he “did a lot to upgrade the system.” Did a lot of what, exactly? If four years of Buttigieg “upgrades” left America’s air traffic control system running on 1980s copper, the word he is looking for is not “upgrade.” It is failure. Even Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel, no conservative, said it publicly: “You had four years in the job and infrastructure money, yet made zero progress modernizing the FAA. You left a failing system in place.”
That is the record. Four years. Trillions sloshing through Washington. An infrastructure bill sold to the American people as a generational fix. And when the bill came due on Friday night, the FAA was still hostage to a legacy network that could not handle its own data.
Every stranded family Friday night paid for it. Every missed wedding, every missed funeral, every business traveler sleeping on an airport floor, every crew timed out and every Saturday flight canceled in the cascade — that chaos traces straight back to leaders who were warned and did nothing serious about it. They inherited the finest aviation system in the world and treated it like a museum piece: admire it, photograph it, and assume it will run forever on its own.
It will not. Systems fail when presidents fail to maintain them.
Now this administration is left pleading for tens of billions to rebuild what should never have been allowed to decay this far, and asking the traveling public to be grateful that nobody was hurt. Gratitude is not the right word. Fury is.
Congress should fund a real, crash modernization of air traffic control — with deadlines, with accountability, and with no more money disappearing into studies, consultants, and bureaucratic drift. And history should record Friday night exactly as it was: not a freak outage, not bad luck, and not an act of God.
It was the predictable, humiliating result of the Biden administration’s failure to maintain and upgrade America’s aviation safety systems. The skies went dark because, for four years, the people in charge were asleep at the switch — and on Friday, the switch finally gave out.
