What the Northeast Air Traffic Outage Shows About Network Redundancy
The Philadelphia TRACON outage shows that having a backup fiber connection isn't enough if both paths share the same physical vulnerabilities, and FSO can provide an independent path through the air.
- Underground fiber routes can share risks from construction and excavation.
- FSO offers high-capacity connectivity without relying on another fiber route.
- Theia can add physical path diversity to critical networks.
Why managing AI risk presents new challenges
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The difficult of using AI to improve risk management
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How to bring AI into managing risk
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Pros and cons of using AI to manage risks
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Benefits and opportunities for risk managers applying AI
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On September 21, 2026, a telecommunications failure at the FAA’s Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control center (TRACON) disrupted air traffic across the Northeast.
The problem started with a failure of the facility’s primary telecommunications circuit. When the system attempted to switch to its backup, officials found that the backup fiber line had also been damaged. A construction crew working in New Jersey had accidentally cut the Verizon fiber cable, leaving the facility without the path it needed to operate normally.
The result was significant. Newark Liberty International, Philadelphia International, Teterboro, LaGuardia and JFK were among the airports affected, with hundreds of flights canceled and thousands more delayed. Operations resumed after the damaged telecommunications lines were repaired, but the incident continued to disrupt travel into the following day.
For network operators, the incident is a useful reminder that having a backup connection is not necessarily the same thing as having a physically independent one.
Redundancy Depends on More Than Having a Second Fiber Path
Network redundancy is intended to keep a connection available when the primary path fails. But the effectiveness of that redundancy depends in part on how independent the two paths actually are.
Two fiber routes may use separate cables and still share some of the same physical risks. They can pass through the same construction corridor, follow the same right-of-way, or depend on infrastructure that can be affected by the same excavation or civil construction activity.
That is essentially what made Monday's outage so consequential. The primary circuit failed, and the backup path was unavailable when it was needed.
This does not mean fiber is inherently unreliable. Fiber remains the foundation of modern communications networks. It does mean that network designers need to consider physical path diversity when connectivity is critical enough that an outage is not an acceptable outcome.
Adding a Different Physical Path
One way to approach that problem is to introduce a communications path that does not depend on the same underground infrastructure.
Free-space optical communications, or FSO, uses focused light to transmit data through the air between two terminals. Because the connection does not require a physical cable between the endpoints, it can provide a different physical path from an existing fiber network.
That makes FSO useful in situations where installing another fiber route is difficult, expensive, or still months away. It can also provide a temporary connection while permanent infrastructure is being constructed, or serve as part of a longer-term network architecture.
Dayton Photonics' Theia™ Fiberless Optics is designed for these types of high-capacity connections.
Theia provides:
- 10 Gbps full-duplex throughput for high-capacity network connections.
- Sub-millisecond latency for applications where network delay matters.
- Up to 2 miles of operational range, depending on deployment conditions.
- Optomechanical beam steering designed to maintain alignment between terminals as conditions change.
- Deployment without trenching or asphalt cutting, allowing a link to be established without waiting for a new underground fiber route to be constructed.
Where spectrum licensing is concerned, Theia operates as an optical link rather than a conventional RF wireless system, requiring no FCC licenses.
Designing for the Failure You Don't Expect
The lesson from the Philadelphia TRACON outage is not that fiber networks are inadequate. It is that redundancy has to account for the physical infrastructure behind the connection.
A second cable does not necessarily eliminate a shared point of failure. In critical networks, it can be worth asking a more basic question: If the ground-based network is unavailable, is there another physical way to connect these two locations?
For some applications, the answer may be another fiber route. For others, an optical link through the air can provide an additional layer of physical diversity without waiting for new underground construction.
That is where fiberless optics can fit into the network design: not as a replacement for fiber, but as another path when the consequences of losing that fiber are too significant to ignore.
