FAA Ends US Flight Grounding as Delays Set to Drag On
The Federal Aviation Administration lifted its nationwide ground stop on Saturday, November 14, 2026, after a communications failure halted US flights for hours. Thousands of flights were delayed or canceled, and Transport Secretary Sean Duffy said recovery will take time.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted a nationwide ground stop on Saturday, November 14, 2026, letting flights resume after a communications failure halted departures for hours. With the flight grounding lifted, delays are expected to continue for a long time.
Flights were allowed to restart at about 12.30pm Australian Eastern time. Nearly 10,000 flights were delayed, according to tracking service FlightAware. Cancellation counts varied: one tally put them above 5,100, another above 1,000.
The shutdown, ordered Friday in the US, was only the second nationwide ground stop since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
What officials said caused it
The FAA first said there had been "a temporary telecommunications outage" and that all flights were halted "out of an abundance of caution". It added that every flight had been accounted for and that international flights would be handled case by case.
Transport Secretary Sean Duffy blamed overloaded network routers. "Our routers actually got overloaded with data, and … they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers," he said. "And because of that, we shut the system down."
An airline source said the FAA told carriers the problem was with network routers. The fault is believed to have started at Chicago Midway International Airport and spread nationwide.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication of a cyber-attack, despite an ongoing Microsoft outage. He said no lives or flights were ever at risk.
Recovery and funding
Duffy said about 3,500 flights were in the air when the grounding notice went out. By his last check, that figure was down to about 400.
He said the government would work with airlines to speed up flights but admitted it would "take some time to unwind". He expects normal operations to return by Thanksgiving on November 26.
Duffy said the US relies on an outdated air communications system and called for $US50 billion to upgrade it. He warned that more outages would follow without action.
Congress approved $12.5 billion last year to upgrade the FAA's air traffic control systems and hire more controllers.
Airports and international travel
Photos showed airports full of passengers waiting for updates. Some airports were saturated with grounded aircraft that could not take off.
Qantas said a small number of its flights were delayed. It is offering extra flexibility to customers traveling to or from the US on November 13 and 14.
The previous nationwide ground stop came on January 11, 2023. It followed contractors accidentally deleting files that disrupted the Notice to Air Missions system, and more than 10,000 flights were delayed or disrupted over a 90-minute stoppage.
FAA technicians were still investigating the cause of the latest failure.
