The FAA ground stop that halted departures at airports across the United States on Friday has been lifted, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, after a communications failure knocked out radio and radar at several air traffic control centres. Flights are resuming slowly, but Duffy warned that the disruption would take time to clear, with many passengers still stranded at airports.
Duffy announced on X shortly after 8 p.m. US Eastern Time on 13 November (2 a.m. Saturday in Nigeria) that the airspace had been reopened, Fox Business reported. “It’s going to be slow,” he said, urging travellers to check with their airlines. NPR, CNN and the BBC also reported the stop had been lifted after more than four hours.
How the FAA ground stop began
The problems started at about 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time, when the FAA’s command centre in Washington was told that several air route traffic control centres had lost radio and radar, according to aviation news site The Air Current. The failures began at the Chicago centre, with Boston, Washington, New York and Minneapolis reporting problems soon afterwards.
The FAA first halted flights heading east, then extended the ground stop nationwide shortly before 4 p.m. “out of an abundance of caution,” citing communication issues affecting multiple centres. Planes already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations, and medical, emergency and some international flights were permitted to depart.
What caused the outage?
The exact cause has not been confirmed. White House officials described it as an air traffic control communications issue, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called it “just a telecommunications outage,” saying there were no current indications of a cyberattack or terror threat, The Air Current reported. President Donald Trump told Fox News it did not seem like a cyberattack.
Duffy said the system had become overloaded and blamed ageing equipment, including outdated routers, according to Fox Business. Officials said they were also looking at whether there was any link to a new AI scheduling system recently switched on at the FAA’s control centres, but the system’s developer, Air Space Intelligence, said the ground stop was not caused by its technology.
Travel chaos and what travellers should do
The halt left aircraft backed up at major hubs, with more planes on the ground than available gates at Chicago O’Hare, and airlines diverting some flights to smaller airports, The Air Current reported. United Airlines activated its emergency operations centre, while Delta said it was resuming flights but that resetting its operations would take time. Frontier issued a travel waiver for 13 to 15 November.
Passengers flying in the US over the weekend, including Nigerians travelling to or connecting through American airports, are advised to check their flight status with their airline before heading to the airport. In Canada, Nav Canada said its own systems were working normally but warned of delays at Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver.
What happens next
The FAA and the Department of Transportation are investigating the cause. Duffy said he could not rule out another outage and is seeking $50 billion in emergency funding to overhaul the country’s air traffic control system, Fox Business reported. This was the first nationwide ground stop in the US since January 2023, when a failure of the NOTAM pilot alert system grounded flights.
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Sources: Fox Business, The Air Current, NPR, CNN, NBC News, BBC News.
