CBS News
Julia Falcon
20 September 2025
The Federal Aviation Administration says outdated infrastructure is to blame for an unexpected ground stop on Friday at Dallas' two major airports.
The ground stop was in effect for about five hours, impacting all flights at Dallas Love Field and Dallas-Fort Worth International airports.
The FAA said the disruption was caused by multiple failures of the TDMI data telecommunications service provided by Frontier, which led to the outage impacting the FAA's Dallas TRACON facility.
Additionally, the FAA said an oversight by L3 Harris, an FAA contractor, failed to make sure that redundancies in the system functioned properly.
The outage is a "clear example of the FAA's outdated infrastructure and underscores the urgent need to modernize our air traffic control systems," the FAA said.
American Airlines COO David Seymour said the FAA told the airline that the issue originally stemmed from two cut fiber optic cables, impacting the primary and secondary paths of data that support the FAA's area radars, radio systems and computer systems. The FAA had developed alternative methods to release flights from their gates, Seymour said, but it was extremely slow.
