A Private Trap For The American Sky
- 14.11.2026, 15:57
There's no doubt at all who will be the first to take advantage of this "blackout."
Friday, November 13. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issues a National Ground Stop directive and orders the suspension of all departures at all airports nationwide “due to extraordinary circumstances and for safety reasons.”
But there is nothing mysterious about this wording: at the same time, communications “went down” at all Area Control Centers (ARTCCs), which guide aircraft in flight levels over the continent. The country with the world’s most powerful aviation industry once again found itself in the position of the shoemaker without shoes, where the multibillion-dollar transition from L3Harris’s old ground-based lines to Verizon’s new network has been stalled for years on two-decade-old equipment with only a handful of switching nodes.
There’s no doubt who will be the first to take advantage of this “blackout.” Elon Musk has been trying since last year to oust traditional telecom operators from the $2.4 billion contract to modernize the FAA’s communications system, and just two weeks ago, SpaceX officially demanded that the U.S. air traffic control system be restructured to accommodate its 10,000 space launches per year and that its own Cleared platform be integrated directly into the control consoles. Now the argument from SpaceX lobbyists will sound as enticing as possible: ground-based providers have “let us down” again—so hand over the channel reservations to Starlink.
But the problem is that replacing a cumbersome government infrastructure with a private satellite monopoly poses a far more dangerous threat to security.
Ukraine is experiencing this trap firsthand right now. For the second time this month, a software speed limiter set at 161 km/h has been activated at Starshield military terminals over the occupied territory and along the front lines, which restricts the operation of high-speed aircraft and interceptor drones precisely when they are needed to catch up with Russian jet-powered weapons.
While SpaceX publicly denies any changes and Musk shifts the blame to the U.S. government, we are faced with the fact that proprietary closed-source software in a critical loop acts as an external kill switch capable of disabling aviation more effectively than any enemy electronic warfare system. In other words, if Washington integrates this model into the core of its own air traffic control system, the technical point of failure will simply be replaced by a corporate-political one.
Today’s paralysis of U.S. airports and our battle for frequencies strike at the same vulnerable point across the entire modern communications industry. The world has deluded itself into believing in a fail-safe “cloud” and a constant broadband connection to every aircraft, forgetting the basic physics and architecture of survivability.
In the reality of the 21st century, it doesn’t matter whether a guaranteed communication channel disappears due to a failure of a backbone gateway in peaceful Chicago or because of targeted “white noise” and traffic shaping near Kyiv.
Is there a way out of this impasse? Yes.
The first approach is enforced network heterogeneity. No airspace control system—whether civilian or military—should be allowed to depend on a single “pipeline” or a single vendor. Resilience is ensured only by a hybrid mesh architecture, where fiber optics, radio relay links, local tactical MANET networks, and various satellite constellations mutually overlap without a central switch and without a single owner of the “red button”.
The second layer is the autonomy of the end device. The higher the speed of aerial combat, the shorter the external “leash” must be. When an interceptor is pursuing a jet-powered target at a speed of 250–400 km/h, it should not have to request permission from a satellite or an office in Texas to execute a maneuver. The combination of a local tactical radar and an onboard guidance system operates on a “fire-and-forget” principle: once initial target acquisition is complete, everything is determined by the vehicle’s own physics, aerodynamics, and onboard algorithms.
After all, if your airspace depends either on an old ground-based cable from the ’90s or on the whims of a single billionaire, sooner or later you’ll be issued a Ground Stop. And the price of a minute of silence on the airwaves could turn out to be very high.
Anatoly Khrapchinsky, aviation expert, UNIAN