Passengers Face Airport Delays After FAA Lifts US Ground Stop
The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop on Friday after more than four hours. FlightAware counted over 10,000 delays and 4,000 cancellations as airlines worked to reposition aircraft and crews. Officials have not named a cause.
Passengers face airport delays and cancellations across the United States after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted a nationwide ground stop on Friday, November 13, following a halt to departing flights that lasted more than four hours.
The FAA issued the order at 3:54pm Eastern time and lifted it at 8:15pm, which was 01:15 GMT on Saturday. It blamed a "communication issue" that affected air traffic control centers.
Scale of the disruption
More than 10,000 flights were delayed and over 4,000 cancelled, according to FlightAware, a flight-tracking service. Airlines now have to get aircraft and crews back into position, so more delays are likely.
Flightradar24, another tracking site, said 4,042 flights were in the air and heading to US airports when the order came. The problem hit all 22 air route traffic control centers, the facilities that guide aircraft between airports.
In an afternoon post on X, the FAA described a "temporary telecommunications outage." It said it halted all flights as a precaution and would handle international flights case by case.
Cause still unknown
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters there was no sign of a threat to the country. "Everybody's safe. The flights are accounted for," he said. "This is not another 9/11."
The FBI does not believe a cyberattack or criminal activity caused the failure, according to an official familiar with the matter. Investigators are examining whether a software update played a role, though no cause has been determined.
Mullin said officials had not ruled out a planned AI tool for air traffic controllers as a factor. "You just can't rule out anything at this point. We are going through that process," he said.
Air Space Intelligence (ASI), the company behind the FAA's AI-powered air traffic management system, rejected that link. "The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC," it said in a post on X.
The FAA awarded ASI an $875m contract in June for the SMART system. It announced on November 10 that it would expand the system across all 22 centers.
Political reaction
President Donald Trump had not addressed the outage publicly after the ground stop was announced. Mullin said Trump was "fully engaged" and had spoken with senior officials several times. "I don't run the president's comms," he told a reporter who asked why Trump had been silent.
Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat and the ranking member of the Aviation Subcommittee, called for a "thorough and complete investigation." She said she would demand answers from the FAA.
The outage adds to strain on the US air traffic control system, which has faced equipment failures, communications problems and controller shortages while the FAA tries to replace ageing infrastructure.
