…the bartender asks “What’ll ya have Mister Secretaries?” then adds: “You better order quick – we’re just about out of everything.”

I’ve never personally experienced anything as sweeping as the air traffic ground stop currently paralyzing airports around the U.S. and causing worldwide delays, but I’ve gotten fairly close. I was en route home from a Christmas vacation in Bermuda when the infamous Underwear Bomber caused similar massive delays… leaving me with little better to do than help deplete the liquor inventory at the Chili’s in Charlotte’s international airport. 

As someone who formerly managed digital assets in large-scale corporate environments, I do have a fair amount of personal experience with that rather unhappy event known as a root failure cause analysis (RCFA) meeting. Such meetings are typically called in the immediate aftermath of a system outage big enough to impact ‘the business’ – the term old IT guys use to describe everyone and everything in a company that is not considered ‘IT’.

When conducted by competent management, such meetings are a genuine effort at determining what went wrong, with the goal of presenting recommendations for a permanent fix to ‘the business’… as well as the inevitable price tag for making that fix.

When conducted by less competent management, an RFC meeting is little more than an effort to determine who can most easily be assigned blame for the outage – typically the juniormost contractor on the team responsible for the system – and implement a ‘fix’ that involves spending as little money as possible to keep things running. I should mention I was a contractor for most of my career, if not a ‘junior’ contractor… I have been in that hot seat.

It is a reasonably safe assumption that everything I just said would sail completely over the heads of Sean Duffy and MarkWayne Mullen except for the ‘blame’ part – which they are already working on (literally blaming a contractor), at least as hard as they are working on bringing the ‘system’ of United States aviation infrastructure back to capacity. If they ever get around to conducting any sort of RFCA meeting, it will almost certainly be of the latter category – perhaps expanding blame from a hapless contractor to include either Congress or the Biden Administration.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for either the analysis or the meeting… although a $50 billion price tag for a proposed ‘fix’ is already being floated, even as system restoration struggles into place.

The simple truth is that these are not serious men and they are in over their heads. 

Transportation Secretary Duffy comes to his current role, as does much of the Trump Regime, from a career grounded in ‘reality’ television developed from earlier efforts as a hockey player and participant in ‘lumberjack competitions’ – effectively, a male model yielding a chainsaw. He eventually acquired a law degree and entered politics, serving in the House for some ten years before returning to the entertainment industry until nomination to his current role – which was inaugurated by cuts to transportation funding and attempts to blame an air crash on ‘DEI policies’. A real RFCA meeting would certainly include a review of Duffy’s policies to date… but, again, don’t hold your breath.

At least Homeland Security Secretary Mullen has a resume that includes some level of exposure to complex systems, having run his family’s plumbing business for some twenty years before succumbing to the allure of the bright lights and spending a couple of years as a mixed martial arts fighter and talk show host… before serving his home state of Oklahoma in both House and Senate. If his family had been electrical contractors as well as plumbers, I might have more confidence in his understanding of the current crisis – or maybe not. He was hired for optics, not competence, with the primary assignment of ensuring that ICE would be able to continue terrorizing brown people with less theatrics than his predecessor, the canicidal Kristi Noem.

Mullen’s overview description of this outage as being the end results of attaching modern improvements to the ‘little copper wires’ of aging FAA network infrastructure has little more substance than telling a teacher in the pre-digital era that the family dog ate your homework. Another takeaway from my corporate IT career is that the world is full of aging infrastructure that remains ‘mission critical’ – and the larger the enterprise, the more likely such infrastructure exists. 

And few enterprises approach the scope and scale of federally-managed U.S. aviation infrastructure.

My experience was mostly in the oil and gas industry, but I’ve also had to work with legacy systems running on code execution in COBOL and 4GLs, and know – again, from personal experience – how much work went into preventing Y2K problems in COBOL-based financial systems. One reason you don’t cut senior staff with institutional knowledge is that they are all too often the living and only documentation of what is required to manage the interface between legacy and contemporary systems.

But, to a man with a chainsaw, the entire world looks like a tree ripe for felling – and Duffy cooperated more than not with Elon Musk’s DOGE.

The incoming Democratic Congressional majority needs to resist the pressure to simply give Duffy fifty billion dollars, in order to repair a problem his own policies most likely caused in the first place. The American people deserve a real root failure cause analysis, not merely a finger-pointing session or a lively game of musical chairs.

We also deserve a robust and distributed digital infrastructure that prevents future such failures – and I am not merely referring to the infrastructure that powers aviation. Mere days before the outage that resulted in the ground stop order, the FAA deployed an AI based tool called the “Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories (SMART) system”, a deployment that itself occurred within days of yet another massive outage, this one impacting every single business in the world using Microsoft products and cloud services.

Although Air Space Intelligence (developers of SMART) and Microsoft were both quick to deny any collateral responsibility for the air traffic outage, it would be foolish to assume that these denials are based on a comprehensive, definitive analysis. The reality is that the complexity and interdependency of cloud and AI based digital infrastructure makes any such rapid analysis impossible.

It is entirely likely that countries around the world (particularly in Europe) that are finding it necessary to develop strategies of digital sovereignty excluding companies like Microsoft will find it equally in their interest to avoid products like SMART. I’ve previously suggested that digital sovereignty should be considered a States Right. The mere fact that the legislative branch of the U.S. government is shifting out from under the control of outright authoritarians does not diminish the key elements of that argument.

If anything, it strengthens them.

Federated, distributed systems, based on open and non-proprietary technologies, are almost by definition more robust than closed, proprietary systems that are centrally managed and dependent upon oligarchic late-stage capitalism. But as long as the oligarchs retain control of the U.S. federal system, that federated approach will remain off the table.

We may be so lucky as to see that control weakened, if the Blue Tsunami becomes a long-term realignment. If so, a parallel technology realignment based on ideas of ‘cyber-regionalism’ could have lasting and dramatic impact.

Just don’t tell the lumberjack or the MMA fighter… at least not yet.

Images: Getty/Futurism/UFC