An aviation management expert says Canada is less likely than the United States to ground flights nationwide as that country did on Friday afternoon, calling the Canadian system a model its southern neighbours should look to.
John Gradek, a faculty lecturer in supply networks and aviation management at McGill University, says the Canadian system is more robust and modernized than the one the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration operates with.
“They should look north — they should look to Canada,” Gradek said.
“You have to take it out of the hands of the politicians to finance your air traffic control system … If the system can go down the way it did Friday night [because] some guy supposedly clipped a wire on a router … and it brings down the whole of the U.S. aviation system, something is wrong.”
The FAA issued a so-called ground stop order on Friday, citing communications issues affecting the nearly two-dozen air traffic control centres that direct planes en route between airports across the country.
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Airports across Canada suspended flights to and from the United States, and Air Canada said late Friday that it was cancelling the rest of those flights for the rest of the day.
The U.S. order was lifted late Friday and flights resumed, but airlines warned it could take days before things are back to normal.
The FAA on Sunday described a radar site in Amarillo, Texas, and a radio communications site in El Dorado, Ark., as potential sources for the problem, which involved excess data flooding the air-traffic control system and causing intermittent disruptions to communications and radar feeds.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said after a contractor replaced old copper wire with new fibre wire at the Arkansas site and the router was turned on, a problem then cropped up in Texas, cascading into the ground stop.
In multiple appearances on Sunday news shows, Duffy continued to press Congress for billions of dollars for upgrades to the air-traffic control infrastructure.
US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy holds a press conference after the FAA issued a national ground stop yesterday, at the Department of Transportation in Washington, DC, US, November 14, 2026. REUTERS/Eric Lee (Eric Lee/Reuters)
“I can’t apologize for what was passed on to us. And I can’t blame Republicans or Democrats, because it’s all of them. It goes back, 20, 25, 30 years of a lack of investment,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press.
Gradek said the funding model of the American FAA is entirely the problem, and that the agency is operating with outdated equipment instead of modern fibre optic cables that can handle higher surges of data.
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In Canada, air navigation service provider Nav Canada operates outside of government, collecting its funding from airline ticket sales, which Gradek said shields the non-profit organization from political decisions about how much resources should be allocated to it.
“We’re the envy of the world in Canada in terms of how we have our air traffic control systems in place, and the management of those systems by Nav Canada,” Gradek said.
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“I’ve never seen this type of fragility in an air traffic control system where one wire brings down everybody.”
In an emailed statement, Nav Canada said its systems were not affected by Friday’s outage in the United States, and air traffic services in Canadian airspace continue to operate normally.
The statement pointed to $3.5 billion it invested in the air-traffic management system and associated infrastructure.
“Redundancy is built in at multiple levels, including backup systems and established contingency procedures that our teams train on regularly so that operations can continue safely,” spokesperson Maryam Amini said.
