Tech troubles create aviation chaos on both sides of the Atlantic
- Reference: 1758518322
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/09/22/technology_problems_cause_aviation_delays/
- Source link:
In Europe, the source of the problem is a company called Collins Aerospace that makes a product called ARINC cMUSE that it [1]describes as a “next-generation common-use passenger processing system solution that allows multiple airlines to share check-in desks and boarding gate positions at an airport rather than having their own dedicated infrastructure.”
Maybe it does that when it’s working, but [2]according to Brussels Airport, Collins Aerospace experienced “a cyberattack” that means passengers should expect delays and flight cancellations.
[3]
Collins Aviation [4]told Reuters that it suffered a "cyber-related disruption" that means electronic customer check-in and baggage drop isn’t working, but that manual check-in operations remain possible.
[5]
[6]
London’s Heathrow Airport first mentioned the problem on Friday, and late on Sunday night [7]advised “Work continues to resolve and recover from the outage of a Collins Aerospace airline system that impacted check-in. We apologise to those who have faced delays, but by working together with airlines, the vast majority of flights have continued to operate.”
At the time of publication, Collins Aerospace had no comment.
Dallas delays
While airlines in Europe reverted to manual processes, services in the US experienced disruptions after something severed a pair of fiber optic cables at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) on Friday.
A Saturday [8]Xeet from the Federal Aviation Administration said “Yesterday’s disruption was caused by multiple failures of the TDM data telecommunications service provided by Frontier - a local telecommunications company. This then led to an outage impacting the FAA’s Dallas TRACON facility.”
[9]
TRACON stands for Terminal Radar Approach Control, a key part of the USA’s air traffic control system. The regulator also blamed L3Harris, one of its contractors, and said it “failed to ensure that redundancies in the system functioned properly.”
[10]French jet left circling while Corsican controller caught Zs
[11]Sky-high budget gap: FAA launches air traffic overhaul, lacks cash to finish it
[12]Europe Putin the blame on Russia after GPS jamming disrupts president’s plane
[13]Airbus okays use of ‘Taxibot’ to tow planes to the runway
David Seymour, CEO of American Airlines (AA), [14]offered more detail .
“Those cut cables impacted the primary and secondary paths of data, which support all of the area’s FAA radars, radio frequencies and computer systems,” he wrote. “For American and other operators at DFW, that meant the FAA was unable to release flights in an automated fashion, significantly limiting our ability to depart flights from DFW.”
Seymour says the FAA developed a workaround that allowed airlines “to release flights from the gate,” but said those processes “were extremely slow” and “simply couldn’t keep up” with AA’s flight schedule.
“To put American’s impact in context, between 3:00 PM and 6:00 PM CT yesterday, we could only depart a total of nine aircraft from DFW. That number is usually around 100 per hour.” The airline cancelled almost 700 flights, and diverted 65 – many of which spent a night at an airport other than DFW.
[15]
DFW operations are normal at the time of writing, after the airport, Frontier, and L3Harris hustled to find a fix. The FAA described the incident as a “clear example of the FAA’s outdated infrastructure and underscores the urgent need to modernize our air traffic control systems.”
“It also highlights the critical importance of clearing thousands of state and local permitting obstacles, which will delay modernization efforts by years. Moving from aging, analog systems to more resilient, digital technology, is critical to maintaining the reliability and resiliency of the national airspace system.” ®
Get our [16]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.collinsaerospace.com/what-we-do/industries/airports/passenger-processing-solutions/agent-assisted-check-in
[2] https://www.brusselsairport.be/en/passengers/infopage/difficult-airport-operations
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/cybercrime&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aNEeNly9Y3No-lg7ZT5TfQAAAtA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.reuters.com/en/cyberattack-causes-flight-delays-cancellations-brussels-airport-2025-09-20/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/cybercrime&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aNEeNly9Y3No-lg7ZT5TfQAAAtA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/cybercrime&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aNEeNly9Y3No-lg7ZT5TfQAAAtA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://x.com/HeathrowAirport/status/1969899696316469703
[8] https://x.com/FAANews/status/1969460004781473935
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/cybercrime&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aNEeNly9Y3No-lg7ZT5TfQAAAtA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/18/atc_controller_falls_asleep/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/faa_begins_air_traffic_overhaul/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/02/eu_gps_jamming_russia_response/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/07/airbus_taxibot/
[14] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/update-dfw-area-airspace-issues-david-seymour-jvv5c/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/cybercrime&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aNEeNly9Y3No-lg7ZT5TfQAAAtA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Redundancy
You make a good point which shows true redundancy can be very difficult and/or expensive to achieve. Imagine you want redundant power feeds from separate sub-stations for your facility, the power company are happy to provide them, but it so happens your facility is the other side of the freeway from the substations and there's only one nearby bridge with a suitable cable culvert crossing that freeway. Both cables end up crossing the same bridge, and then a truck hits the bridge and you have a single point of failure. Most bean counters wouldn't sanction the extra cost to build the infrastructure to fix that, claiming it's an "acceptable risk", which is why things like a single sub-station fire take out Heathrow Airport for 24 hours or more.
Re: Redundancy
"which is why things like a single sub-station fire take out Heathrow Airport for 24 hours or more"
The redundancy issue here is about the way that the airport systems were connected, and managerial decisions by the airport about recovery, not about a single point of failure.
Heathrow isn't supplied by a single substation, there are two others that can supply the entire airport demand, but it was reliant upon the one at North Hyde and had inadequate airport systems failover to the alternative power supplies. Even with lack of failover, the two other substations could have supported recovery at Heathrow far more quickly. It was the airport CEO's deputy Javier Echave who took the decision to shut the airport at 01:15 on March 21, that was less than two hours after the fire started, and also at that decided it would remain closed until 23:59. There certainly would have been disruption caused by the power loss and bringing systems back on line, but the chaos and lengthy closure was entirely of Heathrow's own making.
Re: Redundancy
What if the break was in the last section near the point of entry? How many facilities have truly separate access points?
The chickens
... are coming home to roost.
Maybe don't have your nepo hires outsource your IT duties?
Crazy commie talk, I know.
Re: The chickens
That's the problem with crapitalism, you soon run out of money to cover the mistakes made because you were too tight to do it right first time.
El Reg used to be the best source around for up-to-the-minute tech news. It has lagged behing more often in recent years.
The story of a cyber attack affecting multiple major European airports has been running on non-specialist news media since Saturday. It made it to El REg on Monday morning.
Do you post early to grab the "first click" and just post Twatter scare-mongering screenshots or post later once you've have some facts and background details?
Nope, there was a relatively brief weekend experiment but other than that they publish on weekdays and usually take a little longer than Twitter so they can actually give more detailed information.
If it were stories which fresh off the social media feeds then what would be the point? You would have thought the US and European problems were related but it turns out that wasn't the case.
El Reg hacks have always had the weekend off. I don’t think that allowing them to rest is reasonable either but nothing has changed there. You noticed this because you saw the story covered by non-specialist media and came here to get the actual details from a source you trust. The fact you are complaining tells me El Reg is still needed.
Russians?
From innocent Russian tankers dragging anchors over sub sea cables, arson in London warehouses and Heathrow electrical substations and the jamming of crucial satellite communications, there does seem to be a lot of suspicious events happening.
Re: Russians?
You don't need Russian saboteurs when there're so many numpties with diggers trying to get the job done briskly so they can go to lunch.
I was in my house a couple of years ago when the internet went down. Almost immediately there was a knock on the open window. "Your internet go down?" - an Irish bloke in hi-vis. "Yea it did" I replied. Already beginning to walk off he commented "Cable snagged the digger" in a way that strongly suggested it was the cable's fault .
Re: Russians?
Point: The fire in the Heathrow electrical substation was not caused by arson.
Re: Russians?
And China isn't spying on Parliament, and spies climb into their own holdalls and zip them shut.
Re: Russians?
And British Police are the best in the world.
Don't believe the stories you're told.
Re: Russians?
I would not be surprised if the attack on Collins was instigated by Russian units, given the nature of the business. They also have a motive given the extent of disruption to flights in Russia caused by attacks by Ukraine on key targets, causing airports to shut down.
Predictable
Maybe if they employed people who actually understood security things would work better - of course that would cut into invetors proffits, so never going to happen.
Not sure the FAA understand much here
"It also highlights the critical importance of clearing thousands of state and local permitting obstacles, which will delay modernization efforts by years. Moving from aging, analog systems to more resilient, digital technology, is critical to maintaining the reliability and resiliency of the national airspace system"
Whilst I don't doubt the need for modernisation, it's the "modern digital systems" that are the most easily attacked, as in this case.
Collins Aerospace don't have the excuse of being some fly-crap business, they're part of RTX, owners of Pratt & Whitney, and Raytheon. The Collins Aerospace business unit has 80,000 employees and turnover of around $28 billion, larger even than the turnover of either the P&W and Raytheon divisions. Yet still they've been trashed by Russian hackers - I'm sure Krasnov will have a strong response....
Redundancy
Do two fiber optic cables in one trench count as a redundant line?