WASHINGTON, D.C. / MENA Newswire / – Flights across the United States began resuming late on Friday after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop. The order, issued at 3:54 p.m. Eastern Time, had suspended departures from all US airports following a communications outage affecting air traffic control centres. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. ET. The disruption lasted more than four hours and left thousands of travellers stranded.
The FAA said the stop was ordered because of a communications problem affecting its Air Route Traffic Control Centers, adding that technicians were investigating. These centres manage aircraft travelling between regions of the country. Duffy said incoming international flights were handled on a case-by-case basis, with some allowed to depart. Planes already airborne were permitted to land at their destinations. It was only the second nationwide ground stop of all departures since September 11, 2001.
Duffy said flights would restart slowly, depending on the availability of pilots and flight attendants. He urged passengers to check with their airlines before heading to airports. Some passengers were forced to leave their planes and wait hours at terminals for information. Aviation analysts said restoring schedules could take days, because aircraft and crews are spread across connected hub networks. The outage recalled an earlier technology failure that grounded flights and disrupted services around the world.
Aging equipment overwhelmed by data
Duffy blamed old switches and routers that became overloaded with data and failed. He said the system still uses 1980s copper lines, adding that it went down everywhere at once. Communications and radar were not completely lost, he said. Duffy urged Congress to approve $50 billion in emergency funding to modernize the nation’s air traffic control network. He did not rule out the possibility of another outage in the future.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no evidence of a cyberattack and that everybody was safe. Officials acknowledged that new technology being added to the system had overloaded older components, causing intermittent communications and radar gaps. A Government Accountability Office report in September had warned of aging copper cables dating to the 1960s. It said slow modernization risked further disruptions. The report also found that system changes were often scheduled at the same time, overwhelming the network.
Disruption set to spill into the weekend
FlightRadar24 data showed more than 4,700 flights cancelled and 10,000 delayed on Friday. About 700 flights had already been cancelled for Saturday. Cirium said roughly 11,000 flights with more than 1.5 million passengers were scheduled to depart US airports after 4 p.m. ET. At least 827 flights had been diverted by 7:05 p.m., and 670 of them returned to the airports they had left, while 157 landed elsewhere. Cancellations and delays were expected to stretch into the weekend.
Mullin said about 3,000 flights landed safely after the ground stop began. Duffy said it would take time to return to full capacity but expected normal operations before the Thanksgiving travel period. That holiday rush, among the busiest times for US air travel, begins in less than two weeks. Aviation has also been a point of tension with Canada, after Trump threatened to decertify Canada-made Bombardier jets.