Denver Airport Outage: Air Traffic Control Lost Contact With Up To 20 Pilots For 6 Minutes On Monday, Reports Say

[nitpicked]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2025/05/15/denver-airport-outage-air-traffic-control-lost-contact-with-up-to-20-pilots-for-6-minutes-on-monday-reports-say/

An outage at Denver International Airport caused air traffic controllers and pilots to lose contact Monday, following a series of recent radar outages at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport that have raised concerns over flight safety in U.S. airspace.

As many as 20 pilots flying into the Denver International Airport on Monday afternoon lost contact with air traffic controllers for up to six minutes due to multiple radio transmitter outages, an ABC affiliate in Denver reported.

The incident follows a series of equipment failures at New Jersey’s Newark Airport, including an air traffic control equipment outage Sunday that lasted about 45 minutes and two telecommunications outages on April 28 and May 9, during which air traffic controllers lost contact with planes they were guiding to land at the airport.
(snip)

[Dave Bowman]

1. Thanks, Dumpy.

[Akacia]

12. Thanks Obama!

Remember when that was said almost everyday.

[wolfie001]

16. So many of these floated around

Stoopid rePUKES couldn't figure out we were laughing at them.

[superpatriotman]

2. How can we blame Mayor Pete?

- radical republicans probably

[Rebl2]

11. Want to blame

someone, go back 30 or more years. Upgrades should have started under gw bush.

[Lonestarblue]

29. Or go back to Reagan, who fired masses of air traffic controllers to break the union.

Trump/Musk have fired so many people that I’ve lost track, but weren’t a large number of radar maintenance technicians fired? I know they brought back some of the controllers, but maybe not the maintenance workers.

[Rebl2]

39. True

[marble falls]

3. Thanks, Musk! You'll kill someone yet!

[Lovie777]

4. WTF is going on................

[PCIntern]

6. Exactly what I was going to post...

Is there some insidious attack on the software? Are we at cyber war with someone? This is not OK and has never happened with this frequency to my recollection.

[travelingthrulife]

9. DOGE was there monkeying around

[2naSalit]

14. The doge cyber attacks...

Will continue until they are extricated from everything.

[littlemissmartypants]

26. Prolly. ❤️

[hatrack]

5. SLEEPY JOE!!!! CROOKED HILLARY!!! BUTTERY MALES!!! CLENIS!!!!!

In 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . .

[ms liberty]

21. Don't forget khakis, lockboxes and tan suits

[Initech]

37. Talking points revealed on tonight's Hannity featuring Sean Duffy fellating Trump.

[617Blue]

7. Jake Tapper will investigate Old Joe Biden's role in this FUBAR.

[travelingthrulife]

8. Great job, DOGE boys!

White males are going to save us all!

[milestogo]

10. Sean Duffy, I believe this is your department.

Are you waiting for a crash?

[2naSalit]

15. Another crash!

[milestogo]

20. Its only a matter of days.

You can't operate a system like this and expect things to go perfectly.

[hatrack]

23. "Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who!!"

[RJ-MacReady]

13. Democrats

Need to be out there everyday screaming about this and blaming trump and Elon for it. Because it's their fault.

[Hornedfrog2000]

17. We are going to be terrorized

Mentally, and physically by these people. They are opening the gates to us being attacked.

[blubunyip]

45. We already are

being terrorized, not "going to be."

[LAS14]

18. Does anyone know what the protocol for pilots is in that situation? nt

[ZDU]

34. Keep flying!

(WAG wild ass guess)

[MontanaMama]

19. Somethings up here.

Are they breaking the system so that the can hand it off to Mush?

[70sEraVet]

22. I don't feel so worried that I haven't got my Real ID yet.

[gay texan]

24. Radio guy here

These systems incorperated VOIP transmitter control which is a bad idea.

Lose the network, lose the radio.

For anything this critical, you need a physical backup radio

[SoCal Roomba]

35. Our radios have backups to the backups.

Everything is physical and remote. There is no voip tx, yet. Which means they are fed into facilities via telco. I haven’t seen what the cause of this outage was yet, but dollars to donuts they either already had some main radios down and lost the telco feed to the backups, or they lost the telco feed for all the radios for that frequency.

The problem is with this and Newark, and numerous other outages that don’t make the news is infrastructure, and the contract to maintain our lines is handled by L3/Harris, who recently lost the contract to Verizon, now tasked with moving everything to a fiber backbone, who are being threatened by Musk who wants to move Starlink into the fold, which will suck because its satellite based, which makes me think Musk just wants his hands on the fiber backbone that Verizon has been working on, albeit slowly.

[gay texan]

42. The sad thing

Is i remember when everything was handled in house by the FAA.

The company i worked for wanted the FAA's money so bad that they bent over promising them the world yet delivered two systems that were crap. TDLS and Gulfnet. Gulfnet was horrible because they were feeding audio to two transmitters via crap copper lines in Cancun and Merida, Mexico.

When i left the biz in 2010, they were trying to sell them on a Voip system using Avtec consoles

[SoCal Roomba]

43. I know the TDLS well.

It has become a jack of all trades system. Does a lot of different things, but none particularly well.

[gay texan]

46. One of the best stories

We were responsible for the CRT computer monitors for TDLS among other things.

A monitor went out at the tower in ELP so, i loaded up a monitor, flew out to El Paso, rented a car, installed the monitor, got a hotel, got per diem, and flew back home the next day.

You cant POSSIBLY convince me that saved money for the US taxpayer.

We were so happy when we lost that contract.

Katrina took out VERN and Gulfnet.

[JohnnyRingo]

25. If this keeps up Joe Biden is going to cause a deadly crash.

I'm not sure how yet, but I imagine Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters already have the script.

[BoRaGard]

27. G.O.P. has totally fouled the skies since Jan. 20

what a pack of dangerous anti-science losers the repubes have become

[SpankMe]

28. I'm suspicious

Or, rather, paranoid. DEN is a more modern airport with slightly better infrastructure than these older airports in the east. These outages are eerily similar and there has been no information released about the causes.

My paranoia radar is considering the possibility that these are dry runs for paralyzing the air traffic system for some future, nefarious purpose. This could be from a foreign actor, or from an internal actor preparing for a manufactured calamity that could be used to assert Nazi-like control of society.

[patphil]

30. Is someone testing their ability to shut down our air traffic?

Is it a foreign or domestic enemy?
Is Musk looking for a chance to get a several hundred billion dollar contract to rebuild what he just broke, or has a government or terrorist group gotten into the air traffic control system?
I'm putting my money on Musk and the DOGE boys. All this is happening right after they attacked our Federal Agencies, and looted the systems.
The systems definitely need to be overhauled, but I wouldn't trust Musk to do a proper job.

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/mo/st-louis/transportation/2025/05/08/white-house-air-traffic-control-overhaul-trump-duffy

[CrispyQ]

31. The story I read last night indicated it was old equipment & staffing issues.

The outage occurred at the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center in Longmont, CO.

Outage leaves up to 20 pilots headed to Denver airport unable to contact air traffic control on Monday
By: Tony Kovaleski
Posted 4:49 PM, May 14, 2025

https://www.denver7.com/news/investigations/outage-leaves-up-to-20-pilots-headed-to-denver-airport-unable-to-contact-air-traffic-control-on-monday

snip...

...the outage occurred around 2 p.m., leaving between 15 and 20 aircraft unable to communicate with air traffic control during a critical time. A controller eventually was able to contact one pilot on what’s called a guard line — which is typically used when a pilot is in distress — and that pilot was able to contact the other aircraft to tell them to change frequencies.

One inside source said that four frequencies from the two main towers at the Longmont center were already out of service. Air traffic controllers were communicating with pilots on a backup fifth frequency, which then went out.

more...

Riley said that aging infrastructure and low staffing has been a consistent issue for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and he speculated that this incident could be a direct result of having old equipment.

“It's not acceptable. And the biggest problem is the fact that the FAA does not have stable funding to replace this equipment and maintain it in an appropriate fashion,” Riley said.

Well, that won't get any better under Trump & repubs, that's for sure.

[IronLionZion]

32. I like their twisted logic to blame Biden admin for these problems

as if Biden and Buttigieg were so carefully diabolical to plan the problems to start after they left office.

Or DEI. Or anything other than firing workers despite already having issues with understaffing. DOGE is finding so much fraud, waste, and abuse like that.

"Nobody wants to work anymore"

[ZDU]

33. DOGE. DOGE. DOGE.

fin

[Initech]

36. Thanks Fox News for foisting this nightmare administration and your absolutely worthless cabinet on us!

Fuck you and may the whole damn lot of you rot in the hottest of hells!

[boonecreek]

38. For Trumpers like Scott Duffy blaming Biden,

here's what he signed into law one year ago tomorrow.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/15/politics/house-passes-faa-reauthorization-bill/index.html

[orleans]

40. holy crap! nt

[Irish_Dem]

41. Since the DOGE hackers destroyed the US govt, it has been downhill.

The hackers are going to get people killed.

[proud patriot]

44. Well that sucks

My aunt and uncle are visiting me in Hawaii , they fly home to Denver Today ..