Former airline captain gives insight into nationwide airport ground stop

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) - As Charlotte Douglas International Airport recovers from the nationwide ground stop on Friday, a former American Airlines pilot says it could take three to five days before operations are back to normal for airlines.

Steven Scheibner, a former Captain for American Airlines and host of a popular YouTube channel, has over 30 years of flying experience.

WBTV asked him about the recovery process for airline operations, what the cause of the ground stop was, and how the Federal Aviation Administration can fix the issue for good.

Q- How long and how difficult is it going to be in the next couple of days for all the airlines have to adjust to these big changes?

A- When you have a disruption, it’s called IROPS (irregular operations in the system). Most of the time it’s associated with weather. In this case, it was a computer failure that brought the system down. It’s going take three, four, maybe as many as five days to get the system back up to normal, mostly because crew members, pilots and flight attendants are all over the place and they’ve been displaced from their flights and some of them time out and you have to get them to places that they need to be and they’re deadheading here and there.

Q- Why do certain crew members have to be in certain places?

A- So there’s a lot of moving parts in an airline. There are the airplanes themselves that they have to get to certain places. Not every flight attendant and certainly not every pilot is qualified on every airplane. The pilots especially are very specific to one model airplane. So if their airplane is not where they’re supposed to be, then it’s a misconnect.

Q- Officials say this ground stop was due to aging technology, specifically switching copper wire for fiber, what does that say about the infrastructure of the air traffic control system and what’s needed to improve it?

A- It was great, 50 years ago, but over the years, it’s just it’s gotten old. It’s got out of date. There’s the modern systems that we’re bringing on. You can’t plug them into the old system. So two things have to happen at the same time. You can’t just stop the air traffic control system for a month or two months to redo the whole thing. Everybody’s got to keep flying. So you got to keep using the old equipment at the same time you’re trying to integrate the new stuff.

Q- How did the FAA respond the issue yesterday and did it work how it was supposed to?

A- There’s 20 control centers around the country. They didn’t go completely dark yesterday. It was just they lost a lot of their capability and they lost so much of their capability that basically the FAA said, we don’t want to put anybody else into the air. Let’s let people land. Let’s relieve the system a little bit, keep everybody on the ground. So the way the system is designed to work in an emergency like yesterday, it worked actually fairly well. They ground stopped everybody.

Q- What level of concern, if any, should people have about flying in the future? Also what do people need to do to educate themselves about what’s going on in the airport

A- There’s actually there’s a bunch of really wonderful apps these days. There’s a thing called, it’s an ATC (air traffic control) app and there’s another one, a turbulent forecast. I use them. I think the bigger picture is get yourself educated on how airplanes work, all the different safety systems.