Aviation law expert shares insights on nationwide ground stop that halted flights Friday

All right, so we've been interviewing a lot of aviation-involved people today, whether it be attorneys or experts or ground crews or whatever, and we are joined now by Kent Krause. He's a board-certified aviation attorney, licensed pilot, adjunct aviation law professor at SMU. He's got all angles covered for us. Kent, thanks for being with us. Let's start with this question. What was the one question you believe, or is the one question you believe, the FAA needs to answer quickly to the American public about what happened today? Well, thanks, Steve. I think that they need to answer, what is the cause of this? And is it related? It's been interesting, my own practice has been affected the last two days by outs from Outlook and other internet sources. So is it something consistent with all of that? If you're gonna go into conspiracy theory idea, but more so as we probably aware that You know, our FAA system is outdated and needs to be replaced and the current administration is has pushed to have more money pumped into that. So it'll be interesting to see whether this is just a failure of some outdated equipment that we've had and been using for too long, frankly, and maybe helps push to move forward with more modern ways to do that. All right. So with your history in this industry, are you surprised by what happened today? Or did you say, you know what, it's just a matter of time before this happened? Well, I'm not totally surprised at least what they're describing because I think what we currently have was a ground-based navigation system. So all these different local ground spots around the country have to communicate with each other to make planes work and it's sort of, somebody described it to me, it's like putting a blindfold on somebody and then telling them how to walk through a room. And so we're trying to make the transition to satellite based navigation and make those changes and do that. But, you know, it seems like the more and more we've been connected, you know, like, for example, the outlook issue yesterday, that one thing trips and it seems to knock everything out all over the place. And that's obviously what's happened today. And there's also talk of... Other countries hacking into our systems as well, and that's frightening to people, I think, sitting at home wondering. So if you were flying today, would this incident change your confidence in the safety and the reliability of the American aviation system? You talked about the aging. We've heard that. Would it affect how confident you are? Well, I think that the fact that they took a very aggressive stance to say everybody stand down and do what they did, I think that this is the safest. Air system in the world and that we have in the United States and so I'm not I wouldn't be I'm not I don't want to sound the panic alarm or anything like that but obviously it is an inconvenience for many many people and it certainly at least emphasizes the fact that we need to move forward to make things better and to make things more modernized but then the question there may be when you get into this is beyond the scope of my knowledge but obviously when you have AI involved in different things. I don't know, does that make us more vulnerable to these things or less? But you would hope that it would make it where they can isolate problems and be able to respond to them. Quickly, that's one of the problems obviously today is that they're not exactly sure and how the fix they need to make and it's taking longer than anybody would hope, obviously. Yeah, it is interesting. I'd rather not be in the air when we learn the answers to your questions. Does the system make it better or worse? I'd rather be on the ground when we're finding those things out. Yeah, I agree with you on that. You'd rather be on the ground when something like this happens. But I think they're being very cautious and at least radio contact seems to be. Available still with the aircraft and so they can bring them in safely and that's what's going on. Got it. Okay. That's Kent Krause, adjunct aviation law professor at SMU. Can't we thank you for your time? Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you, Steve and Heather. Thank you.