FAA lifts nationwide ground stop after telecommunications outage disrupts thousands of flights
The Federal Aviation Administration ended a four-hour ground stop that halted departures across the United States due to a telecom failure, while airlines work to restore schedules.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration cancelled a nationwide ground stop on Friday evening after a telecommunications outage forced the temporary grounding of departing flights nationwide. The stop, imposed at 3:54 p.m. Eastern Time, was lifted at 8:15 p.m., allowing airspace to reopen but with a slow resumption of services.
"We've opened up the airspace," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, adding that flights would restart gradually and urging passengers to check with their airlines.
"Everybody's safe," Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said, noting the incident was not comparable to the September 11 attacks.
During the interruption, about 11,000 scheduled flights carrying more than 1.5 million passengers remained pending after 4 p.m., according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. By 7:05 p.m., at least 827 flights had been diverted, with most returning to their departure airports.
FlightRadar24 reported more than 4,700 cancellations and 10,000 delays on Friday, with an additional 700 cancellations slated for Saturday. Analysts warned that restoring full schedules could take several days.
The outage stemmed from overloaded switches and routers in the air route traffic control centres that manage trans-country flights. Todd Curtis, chief executive of AirSafe.com, said the failures were concentrated in the 21 route centers across the lower 48 states and Alaska. Professor Ron Bartsch of the University of the South Pacific questioned why backup systems did not activate immediately, emphasizing the aviation sector's reliance on redundancy.
Duffy indicated that the incident did not involve a loss of radar or communications and ruled out a cyberattack. He called for $50 billion in upgrades to the national air-traffic control system and cautioned that full capacity may not be restored before the busy Thanksgiving travel period.
Passengers were advised to monitor airline communications for updates, as delays and cancellations were expected to continue.