Flights across the United States began moving again on Friday evening after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop that had halted departures for more than four hours and left over a million travellers stranded.
The stop, only the third nationwide halt in the agency’s history, was ordered on Friday afternoon after a failure in the FAA’s private communications network. Officials said ageing analogue equipment was overwhelmed as new technology was installed, and warned delays would continue into the weekend.
By the time the stop was lifted, more than 6,300 flights had been cancelled and 9,500 delayed, according to flight tracker FlightAware, and Air Canada cancelled all of its flights to and from the United States for the evening.
Old switches, old routers
Transport Secretary Sean Duffy blamed decades old equipment at a White House briefing, saying the switches and routers carrying radar and radio data between controllers and aircraft had been overloaded, and warned there would be more such failures without major upgrades.
The trouble began at the Chicago control centre before spreading to Boston, Washington, New York and Minneapolis, according to reports. The fault was traced to the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure network, the private backbone linking air traffic control centres, which is being rebuilt with fibre optic cable to replace copper wire.
The same week brought a reminder of how fast transport technology can move, with a tiny Indiana built kei truck unveiled as a new kind of small vehicle, while the system guiding today’s jets still runs on equipment decades old. Duffy asked Congress on Friday for 50 billion dollars to overhaul air traffic control.
A September report from the Government Accountability Office had warned the rush to modernise could put speed ahead of cost control, noting the programme has no single documented lifecycle cost estimate.
No sign of an attack
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication the outage was a cyberattack or a security threat, though he added there was not complete certainty yet. He described the failure as a telecommunications outage and said incoming international flights had been handled case by case.
Officials also said there was no link to the Microsoft Outlook outage that left users locked out of email the day before, and the company behind a new AI air traffic system switched on earlier in the week denied any connection to the stop.
The last nationwide ground stop came in January 2023, when a failure in the system that sends notices to pilots grounded flights for about 90 minutes. Before that, the only other one followed the attacks of 11 September 2001, when civilian flights stayed grounded for two days.
For travellers, the advice is: check with the airline before heading to the airport, and expect cancellations to ripple through Saturday.
