The FAA ground stop that began on Friday brought departing flights across the United States to a standstill. The stop, which lasted more than four hours, was blamed on aging air traffic control technology that became overloaded during the afternoon. Thousands of flights were canceled, and airlines warned that it could take days for schedules to return to normal.
What happened
The trouble began shortly after 3:30 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, when the FAA began experiencing instability in its radar and communications systems. At 3:54 p.m., the agency issued the ground stop, pausing all departures across the country. In its alert, the FAA said the stop was due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.
The order was lifted at 8:15 p.m. Eastern, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, after lasting more than four hours. It was only the second time since the attacks of September 11, 2001, that a nationwide ground stop had been ordered. The previous time came in 2023, when the FAA’s pilot notification system went down.
Flights that were already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations, but no new departures were permitted while the stop was in effect. The disruption rippled through the weekend. More than 3,300 flights within, into or out of the United States were canceled on Saturday, according to FlightAware figures reported by CNN. As of 6:15 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, Delta had canceled 19 percent of its flights and United had canceled 16 percent.
What caused the ground stop
At a White House briefing on Friday night, Duffy blamed the failure on an aging air traffic control system. He said the switches and routers that carry air traffic data had become overloaded and began producing inconsistent information. The system, he said, was built on technology that is decades old and needs to be replaced.
Officials were quick to say there was no sign that the outage was caused by an attack. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication of a cyberattack, and he said the ground stop was not linked to a disruptive Microsoft outage earlier in the week.
Duffy also pushed back on questions about whether a new artificial intelligence tool, called SMART, could have played a part. The tool is being rolled out at air traffic facilities around the country, and the company behind it has denied any link to the ground stop. Duffy said the failure involved old legacy equipment and that there was no possible way the new tool would have affected what happened.
The episode has put a spotlight on the state of the equipment that guides planes through American skies. Duffy has said the United States has the safest airspace in the world, but he also acknowledged that the systems behind it are old and that the failure was not one officials had expected.
What we know about the impact
For travelers, the effect was immediate and chaotic. Airports filled with passengers waiting for news, and airlines scrambled to reposition aircraft and crews that had been left in the wrong places. A travel expert told CNN that it would take days, not hours, for flights to get back to normal, and Duffy warned that the return to normal schedules would be slow.
The disruption came at a difficult moment, with the Thanksgiving travel period approaching. Duffy said he believed flights would be back up and operational heading into Thanksgiving, but airlines were still working through a large backlog of canceled flights on Saturday. Passengers were urged to check the status of their flights before heading to the airport and to expect delays even after the ground stop was lifted.
What happens next
The ground stop has set off a fresh debate in Washington about paying to modernize air traffic control. Duffy spent much of his briefing on Friday night calling on Congress to provide billions of dollars for a complete overhaul of the system, and Mullin joined him in pressing lawmakers for the money.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called the outage an unprecedented breakdown and said travelers deserve timely answers from the administration about how and why it happened. Investigators are still looking into exactly what went wrong, and officials are expected to face questions from lawmakers in the coming days.
For now, the FAA says flights are moving again, but the recovery is likely to stretch into next week. Travelers with flights in the coming days should keep checking with their airlines, and the industry will be watching to see whether Congress acts on the funding request that the ground stop has made hard to ignore.
Sources
Sources: CNN and ABC News. Featured image: Two airplanes parked on an airport tarmac at sunset. Photo by Nikita Grishin, Pexels License, via Pexels.