The nationwide ground stop that brought all air travel to halt across the country and snarled thousands of passengers has been canceled, according to Federal Aviation Administration.
Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, and Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, addressed the news media at the White House minutes after the ground stop was lifted Friday night. Mr. Mullin reiterated that the public was never in danger and no flights were at risk during the hourslong stoppage. He repeated that there were no signs of a cyberattack, but he added, “we are still looking, and we’re not going to rule it out.”
Mr. Mullin said that new technology upgrades overloaded the existing, antiquated system, “overwhelming” the existing equipment.
“It’s going to continue to fail,” Mr. Duffy added. He also outlined many of the additional investments he believes the air travel system needs, like new air traffic control towers, infrastructure and communication networks.
The F.A.A. had announced a rare ground stop on Friday afternoon, halting nearly all departures and stranding thousands of passengers in what appeared to be a major outage affecting its air traffic control system.
As chaos spread at airports across the country into the evening, travelers sought answers from airline and airport employees. Hundreds of flights were diverted to other airports and more were canceled. Some international flights were still departing from Honolulu and San Francisco for Asia.
More than 2 million people pass through airport security checkpoints on a typical day, according to Transportation Security Administration data. On Thursday, the agency screened nearly 2.5 million people. Amid delays and cancellations on Friday evening, many passengers were taken off flights or told to go home. According to FlightRadar24, an aviation tracking site, there were more than 1,000 airborne aircraft bound for U.S. airports during the nationwide ground stop. According to the flight tracking app Flighty, there were more than 30,000 departures and arrivals scheduled for the remainder of the day.
Passengers waiting to take off Friday afternoon were stuck in limbo.
In the Denver airport, passengers were taken off their flights with their suitcases. A handful began rebooking travel for the next day. But most waited patiently for any kind of update. A Southwest flight attendant announced that the airline expected an update in 30 minutes.
Before the advisory was published, the F.A.A. halted flights to Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports, citing equipment problems, and reported equipment-related departure delays at Newark, Las Vegas, Teterboro, Orlando, Houston and Phoenix.
Friday’s ground stop is only the third such nationwide moratorium on flights in recent history. The F.A.A. issued nationwide ground stops previously on Sept. 11, 2001, in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and on Jan. 11, 2023, due to an outage in the F.A.A.’s system to alert pilots to safety issues.
Here’s what else to know:
-
If your flight is canceled: You are entitled to a refund if your flight is canceled in the United States, regardless of the reason, or if a flight is significantly delayed or changed and you decide not to take it. Here are other travel tips that might be helpful. Read more ›
-
A busy travel month: The ground stop happened about two weeks before Thanksgiving, one of the busiest times of the year for air travel. On average, U.S. airlines are expected to fly about 2.7 million passengers each day over the holiday period, according to industry trade group Airlines for America.
-
The last ground stop: The last nationwide ground stop came in the early morning of Jan. 11, 2023, and lasted around 90 minutes. The disruption came after a system to alert pilots of real-time dangers went down. Read more ›
Christine Chung, Niraj Chokshi, Luke Broadwater, Dustin Volz, Lisa Lerer and Robert Chiarito contributed reporting.
About The Author
