US lifts flight ban after air traffic control failure
The US Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop on Friday after a communications failure at air traffic control centres caused chaos at airports and triggered the longest nationwide shutdown since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said US airspace reopened at 8.15pm Eastern Time, but warned that departures would resume gradually, and it would take time for airlines to restore normal operations.
“It’s going to be slow,” Duffy told reporters at the White House.
More than 6,600 flights were cancelled and 8,600 delayed, with another 1,500 already cancelled for Sunday, according to FlightRadar24.
Aviation analysts said the four-hour nationwide grounding could disrupt airline schedules for days.
Duffy said tens of thousands of passengers were stranded at airports around the country.
The failure is the latest and most dramatic sign of strain on a US air traffic control system beset by ageing technology, equipment and communications problems and a shortage of several thousand controllers.
Duffy said the trouble began at 3.36pm, when air traffic control centres experienced instability in radar and communications systems.
Switches and routers carrying critical data became overloaded, producing inconsistent information and prompting the FAA to halt departures nationwide, he said.
“Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data, and they started to give us inconsistencies in the data from those routers, and because of that we shut the system down,” Duffy said, adding that at no stage did they completely lose radar or communications and were able to safely land thousands of planes.
Duffy said the immediate problem had been fixed and that flying was safe, but warned that a broader overhaul of the ageing air traffic control system was needed to prevent similar failures.
$50bn aviation overhaul
Duffy blamed Congress for failing to fund a new system that he said could prevent such outages, and called for $50 billion to modernise it.
Earlier on Friday, before the outage, the White House and Department of Transportation had urged Congress to approve $30.1 billion to upgrade the nation’s ageing airports and air traffic control infrastructure.
“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said.
“Give us the money to fix it.”
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was “zero evidence” so far that the outage resulted from a cyberattack or a rogue AI system, though investigators had not ruled out either possibility.
“It appears this was mechanically driven, however, we’re still looking,” Mullin said.
The National Security Agency was working with the Department of Homeland Security on the investigation, he added.
The only other nationwide ground stop since the September 11 attacks came in January 2023, when the FAA halted domestic departures for about 90 minutes.
Investors were already pricing in a financial hit to airlines. Shares of American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines fell between 1% and 2% in after-hours trading, while JetBlue Airways dropped about 3%.