FAA Lifts Nationwide Ground Stop After Four-Hour US Flight Halt
A nationwide shutdown of flights across the United States ended on Saturday morning, but thousands of passengers are still stranded at airports and airlines say it could take days to get schedules back to normal. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) halted all departures at 3:54pm Eastern Time on Friday and lifted the order at 8:15pm — four hours and 21 minutes later, the longest nationwide ground stop in the US since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
What happened?
The FAA said a telecommunications outage had hit the air route traffic control centres, and it stopped all departures as a precaution. Flights already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations and land, while international departures were handled case by case. Flights in Alaska and Hawaii were not affected. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said switches and routers had become overloaded with data and gone down, though communications and radar were never lost altogether.
How many flights were affected?
According to FlightRadar24, more than 4,700 flights were cancelled on Friday and around 10,000 were delayed, while 700 flights had already been cancelled for Saturday. Even after 4pm, about 11,000 flights carrying more than 1.5 million passengers were still scheduled to depart from US airports. By 7:05pm, 827 flights had been diverted — 670 returned to their departure airports and 157 were sent elsewhere. At Los Angeles International Airport, Nicholas Erdodi, who had travelled from New Zealand, said he had spent six hours at the airport after 16 to 18 hours of travelling, adding: “The lack of information is what bothers me.”
Not a cyberattack
Speculation about a cyberattack followed the shutdown, but Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was blunt: this was not “another 9/11” and investigators had found no evidence of one. Duffy conceded that America’s air traffic system is old — “We use 1980s little copper lines” — and a Government Accountability Office report published in September had already warned about ageing copper cables dating back to the 1960s and delays in modernising the system. Duffy has called for $50bn in upgrades and said he expects operations to be back up before the busy Thanksgiving travel period.
