The Airforwarders Association (AfA) has called on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to implement recommendations from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) following a report identifying significant gaps in the protection of aviation communications systems.
“The FAA has identified serious threats to critical aviation systems, but this report makes clear that it has not completed the basic risk assessments or built the monitoring needed to address them,” said Brandon Fried, Executive Director, Airforwarders Association.
The GAO found the FAA had not completed risk and mitigation assessments for identified spectrum related threats, including spoofing and jamming, and lacked a defined capability to continuously monitor and detect such threats.
Its report was published on the same day communications equipment failures caused widespread disruption across the Northeast, with the FAA issuing ground stops affecting major airports including Philadelphia International, Newark Liberty International, John F. Kennedy International, and LaGuardia, as world leaders arrived in New York for the United Nations General Assembly.
Around 7000 flights were delayed or canceled during the eight-hour outage, affecting passengers and freight networks alike.
The three major New York airports affected by the outage handled more than 2.2 million tons of cargo last year, according to Port Authority data.
“While Monday’s disruption was not reported as a cyberattack, it showed how quickly problems with critical communications infrastructure can cascade across the aviation system,” said Fried.
“We cannot afford to wait for a malicious actor to exploit a weakness before treating resilience as an urgent priority.”
The GAO issued nine recommendations covering risk management, threat monitoring, information sharing, authentication, and data protection, all of which the Department of Transportation has agreed with.
“The FAA now has a clear set of recommendations and no reason to wait, it must now close these gaps before they are exploited and invest in our aging infrastructure,” said Fried.
The AfA has committed to working with the Department of Transportation and the FAA to ensure the GAO’s recommendations are implemented in full.
