FAA Lifts Nationwide Ground Stop After About Four Hours
The FAA lifted its nationwide ground stop Friday evening after about four hours. Delays and cancellations continue and officials saw no sign of an attack.
The facts come first below. My opinion follows in the section marked as opinion.
The Federal Aviation Administration lifted its nationwide ground stop Friday evening, about four hours after it halted departures at airports across the United States. The Washington Post reported the FAA ended the stop shortly after 8 p.m. Eastern (about 7:15 p.m. Central), and an FAA spokesperson confirmed it. The order had been imposed "due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety". It was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when a pilot notification system failed, and only the second since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Yahoo News reported. Skift reported that it was the third in 25 years and that the 2023 stop lasted about two hours.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the FAA issued the ground stop "following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers". Those centers, ABC News reported, are responsible for flights above 18,000 feet. There are 22 of them in the United States. Duffy told reporters the FAA began "experiencing instability" in radar and communications around 3:36 p.m. Eastern, and that the routers got "overloaded with data," which led to "inconsistency" in the data they sent, BBC News reported. He called it "an incredibly old air traffic control system." The FAA has described the event as a temporary telecommunications outage. The exact root cause had not been formally confirmed in the accounts read for this article, and the agency's investigation continues.
A ground stop of this kind means aircraft already in the air may continue and land, but planes on the ground are not allowed to take off unless they are specifically released. The first official FAA Command Center advisory, signed at 2:54 p.m. Central, said "ALL DEPARTING TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE" and that "INBOUND INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS". A later advisory, signed at 4:46 p.m. Central, said the stop "REMAINS IN EFFECT" and gave the reason as "COMMUNICATIONS FAILURE," with traffic to be released "as conditions allow" under a "tiered approach." Departures resumed after the stop was lifted, but officials and analysts said delays would continue.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, speaking to reporters Friday evening, sought to calm the public. He said there was "no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us". "There's no reason for the public to be afraid or scared for their loved ones", he said. "This is not another 9/11". The Department of Homeland Security later said there were no signs the outage was caused by a cyberattack, Reuters reported. Mullin also said "The public was never in any danger through this process," Skift reported.
The disruption was large and is not over. As of about 8:20 p.m. Central on Friday, FlightAware listed 8,781 flights delayed and 6,508 canceled within, into, or out of the United States, according to the service's live delay and cancellation statistics. Those totals keep changing. Skift, citing FlightAware, reported more than 5,700 cancellations earlier Friday night and 980 already canceled for Saturday. Reuters, citing Flightradar24, reported more than 4,700 cancellations and 10,000 delays on Friday, with 700 canceled for Saturday, and said it could take days for airlines to restore their schedules. Earlier in the afternoon, Flightradar24 said about 3,100 aircraft were airborne and bound for U.S. airports with no additional aircraft taking off. Airlines for America, the trade group for major U.S. carriers, said safety was its top priority and that travelers should seek real-time updates from their airlines.
Microsoft said its own separate global outage did not appear to be a factor, and Mullin likewise said there was no reason to tie the two together, BBC News Mundo reported. The last comparable nationwide halt, in January 2023, involved an outage of the FAA's Notice to Air Missions system, ABC News reported. Travelers should treat airline messages, not rumors, as the authority on their own flights.
Opinion:
If the centers that keep aircraft separated at altitude cannot talk, the government is right to keep planes from taking off. Safety is not a slogan. It is the first duty. Mullin was also right not to stampede the country with talk of another Sept. 11 when he had no evidence of an attack. Fear is easy to sell and hard to unsay.
That does not let anyone off the hook. A telecommunications failure that can freeze departures at every U.S. airport is a serious problem, even if it turns out to be an accident. Duffy himself called the system incredibly old. The 2023 paperwork outage was already a warning that it is thinner than the public is encouraged to believe. Passengers sitting on tarmacs, missing funerals, and sleeping in terminals are paying for that thinness. The country deserves a straight account of what broke, why a failure spread to every air route traffic control center, and what will be done so it does not happen again.
