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

[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.