{"id":4391,"date":"2026-11-14T09:03:53","date_gmt":"2026-11-14T04:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=4391"},"modified":"2026-11-14T09:03:53","modified_gmt":"2026-11-14T04:03:53","slug":"us-lifts-flight-ban-after-air-traffic-control-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=4391","title":{"rendered":"US lifts flight ban after air traffic control failure"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The US Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop on Friday after a communications failure at \u200cair traffic control centres caused chaos at airports and triggered the longest nationwide shutdown since the September 11, 2001, attacks.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to \u200bbe slow,\u201d Duffy told reporters at the White House.<\/p>\n

More than 6,600 flights were cancelled and 8,600 delayed, with another 1,500 \u200balready cancelled for Sunday, according to FlightRadar24.<\/p>\n

Aviation analysts said the four-hour nationwide grounding could disrupt airline schedules \u2060for days.<\/p>\n

Duffy said tens of thousands of passengers were stranded at airports around the country.<\/p>\n

The failure is the latest and most dramatic \u200bsign of strain on a US air traffic control system beset by ageing technology<\/u><\/a>, equipment and communications problems and a shortage of several thousand \u200bcontrollers.<\/p>\n

Duffy said the trouble began at 3.36pm, when air traffic control centres experienced instability in radar and communications systems.<\/p>\n

Switches and routers carrying critical data became overloaded, producing inconsistent information and prompting the FAA to halt departures nationwide, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data, and they started to \u200bgive us inconsistencies in the data from those routers, and because of that we shut the system down,\u201d Duffy said, adding that at no \u200bstage did they completely lose radar or communications and were able to safely land thousands of planes.<\/p>\n

Duffy said the immediate problem had been fixed and \u200cthat flying \u2060was safe, but warned that a broader overhaul of the ageing air traffic control system was needed to prevent similar failures.<\/p>\n

<\/a>$50bn aviation overhaul<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s ageing \u200bairports and air traffic control \u200binfrastructure.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we have is an incredibly \u2060old air traffic control system,\u201d Duffy said.<\/p>\n

\u201cGive us the money to fix it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was \u201czero evidence\u201d so far that the outage resulted from a cyberattack or a rogue AI \u200bsystem, though investigators had not ruled out either possibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt appears this was mechanically driven, however, we\u2019re still \u200blooking,\u201d Mullin said.<\/p>\n

The \u2060National Security Agency was working with the Department of Homeland Security on the investigation, he added.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Investors were already pricing in a financial hit to \u2060airlines. Shares \u200bof American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines fell between 1% and 2% \u200bin after-hours trading, while JetBlue Airways dropped about 3%.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop on Friday after a communications failure at \u200cair 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. \u201cIt\u2019s going to \u200bbe slow,\u201d Duffy told reporters at the White House. More than 6,600 flights were cancelled and 8,600 delayed, with another…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"gutentor_comment":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}