Retired pilot on FAA ground stop

So nationwide ground stops are extremely rare, with only three happening this century. The recent four and a half hour halt was the second longest since 9-11. Our Matthew Seedorf spoke with Kenneth Wells, a retired Southwest Airlines pilot, to get his perspective. First of all, for the guys that were actually flying on that day, there's no safety issues as far as the flying public is concerned. Um, it, it, it doesn't have any relevance as far as things started to get unsafe. And so I, I think some of the reporters I was watching on, on some of the national news programs did a nice job of reporting that, Hey, at no point in time were passengers really in any danger. Um, But it's a huge, it's a huge nightmare. And. And, you know, one of the reasons that I am glad that I'm retired now is because the airline industry has changed significantly just in the last 10 years in terms of the complexity because of the technology. And at Southwest Airlines, we used to hand fly the airplane. Yeah, 35 miles from the airport. You see the airport? Yes, we do. Okay, Southwest 123, you are cleared for the visual approach. You go do your thing and you go land. It's not that way anymore. With the airplanes that have GPS, everybody's got GPS and you know the position of every aircraft down to a foot. Everybody is funneled in on the same exact path coming in and out of the airports, which the reason for that is it allows us to have more airplanes taking off and landing. We can manage more airplanes in the sky at the same time. But the technology is what allows that to happen. And when the technology breaks down and we can no longer communicate, the technology is still working if the GPS systems are up and running. If we can't communicate to the air traffic controllers as we move across those sectors, then because it's so structured and everybody's programming their computers in their airplanes to fly this exact route, It really causes a bigger mess when the airplanes need to be talking to the controllers to stay on this design path and we don't have the communication anymore. And from what I understand, they're trying to say that the breakdown was due to the old technology, the 80s technology that the radar sites and air traffic controllers are using with their screens, with their stuff. Just between Between you and me, I'm not 100% believing in that, only because... One, I think if there was some outside influence that caused some of this, we're not going to panic the public to say, you know, hey, there's this big issue that we didn't have any control over, and we're not going to, they're not going to say that to scare the people. This issue, this has been, this issue's been ongoing now for 10 years at least. We've known we've had outdated technology. We haven't spent the money to fix it, but I'm sure they've had things in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And I'm really shocked at the way this went down today. And I'm not 100% convinced of what we're being told is what really happened. It's just a breakdown of the technology. But we are in a period in the airline industry, you know, we've been hearing I'm hearing all this stuff about AI and everything, where the technology and... And all those things in every aspect of our lives are increasing. Well, it's the same thing in the airline industry. And so now we're so reliant on all this technology that it is a problem if the technology starts to break down. And in the telecommunication world, they are behind. They need to spend the money to fix it. Matt, this is not going to be fixed overnight. We're looking at Thanksgiving coming up. We're looking at the Christmas holidays coming up. If this occurred for the reasons they're saying it occurred, then this is not over. I'm concerned that this is going to happen again. And with the peak flying times we have coming up, it made me sit back tonight and say, I'm not sure I, as an airline pilot, as a retired airline pilot, I'm not sure I want to go buy a ticket and go fly somewhere for a holiday anytime soon. It has me concerned about what are the chances if I need to get somewhere for something, for a big event, a family wedding, something else. The concern for me is, is the airline industry going to be able to maintain what they need to do to make sure that I can get there when I need to get there? It has me sitting up to wonder how reliant is our systems for the next six months to 12 months down the road. Yeah, just this outage, this ground stop. Went on for a little more than four hours. Way longer than I thought that it would go on. If this was the reason that it happened, I was shocked by that. How long is this going to mess up our airspace? Three days. It'll be at least three days, at least three days before the passengers that were inconvenienced and flights that were canceled, before they get all the people who are affected today home to their final destinations. So it'll take at least three days to get the flight schedules back to normal. That's if we don't have any other issues. And And this is just for a normal period of travel. Imagine what's going to happen if we're dealing with a holiday travel time period. It could be seven days or longer. It would not surprise me if we hear from passengers who are told tonight that it's going to be five days from now before we can get you on a flight. We can guarantee you a seat on another flight. So it's going to be at least three days to recover, if not longer. And it's... Yeah. As a former airline pilot for 25 years, what was your initial reaction when you saw this happen? I was actually shocked. I actually stopped what I was doing and turned on the radio because the first thing that surprised me was when they said we're under a national ground stop. Nationwide, we're under a ground stop. Because... So there's been issues. We've had issues ongoing for the five years since I retired. There's still been issues where sectors go down because wires are cut or a transformer blows up or something, and there's an electrical issue. But for there to be a nationwide ground stop, something's going on, Matt, that's way more serious than what I heard in the news tonight. That's a big enough deal. That I stopped what I was doing and turned on the news to hear what is really going on. And the next thing I expected was, I've sat in my airplane with an airplane full of passengers and been on a ground stop. It normally never lasts more than an hour. At the very most I ever had was two hours. It went on longer than that. We were dealing with serious issues, and for this thing to continue as long as it did, I was gravely concerned at what's going on, and it's not something that's going to be fixed in a day or two. This is a serious issue that is not going to go away in the next week, the next month, the next six months. So it was... I was shocked. I was really shocked to see a nationwide ground stop. I think my last thing, and you already mentioned it, but you're not really buying it. They're saying this was essentially caused by old technology. I mean, do you believe it was caused by old technology? And if so, how long is that going to take to fix? I don't believe it. I mean, I honestly, I don't believe it because the technologies that they're operating under Thank you, Tanner, today. is the same technology that they were offering under five years ago when I retired. When I was getting ready to retire, we knew we had aging infrastructure. They were asking for money back then, and the issue never got resolved to the extent that they wanted to. But I know that things were being done on a smaller scale to keep things updated. And so I just. If it was severe enough that they felt like they needed to do a nationwide ground stop, then we've got some serious issues that are not going to go away. And the only way it's going to get fixed is if I was surprised that I listened to people on the news media say this is Congress's fault. Congress, you need to you need to pass legislation, provide us money right now to fix all this stuff. I was surprised by that. And even if that happens, that is not if they if they provide the money tomorrow, it's going to take the better part of 12 months for us to see this stuff get repaired and fixed and brought up to speed as to where it should be today. Okay. Honestly, I'm just not buying it that that this is. There is more to this story. There is more to this story, and I'm going to be watching the news in the next seven days at least because I'm interested to hear more about what's going on because it was for them to do what they did today. It's an extremely serious issue, and it is not going to be an issue that's going to be fixed overnight, and we're coming into the busiest time of the year for the traveling world, and this... If this was this serious, we have not seen the end of it. Eye-opening thoughts there from a retired pilot. I'm Matthew Cedar with that report.