The FAA Grounded Every Flight in America

/ Jim
Airliners parked at gates at Chicago O'Hare International Airport
Photo: Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Scalable Grid Engine, via Wikimedia Commons [CC0 1.0]

At 3:54 PM Eastern on Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration did something it has done only once since September 11, 2001: it ordered every departing flight in the United States to stay on the ground. All of them, at every airport in the country, until further notice — “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.”

The order came from the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center, and its wording left no room for local interpretation: “All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice.” Aircraft already in the air were a different matter — they continued to their destinations and landed. FlightRadar24 counted about 3,100 flights inbound to U.S. airports at the time. Inbound international flights were handled case by case, and a handful of international departures were allowed out as the afternoon went on.

The cause, as officials described it Friday evening, was a communications failure that hit all of the FAA’s Air Route Traffic Control Centers at once — the regional facilities that guide aircraft on the cruise portion of a flight, between the local control of departure and arrival airports. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the FAA first spotted instability in radar and communications systems at 3:36 PM Eastern, eighteen minutes before the stop order. The system that failed, he said, runs on 1980s technology. “What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy told reporters at the White House, saying the switches and routers in the system’s analog technology got overloaded: “They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers, and because of that we shut the system down.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, standing beside him, said there was “zero evidence” the outage was a cyberattack.

What officials have not done is identify the specific component that failed, or prove a root cause. Something inside the NOTAM system — the same communications backbone, maintained by the same contractor, L3Harris, that was implicated in the January 2023 NOTAM failure — stopped working at around 2:30 PM Eastern, and the system that warns pilots about runway closures and hazards went dark. Early reports blaming a software update on the communications network have not been confirmed by the FAA. Overnight, CBS News, citing multiple sources, tied that unconfirmed report to the private communications network operated by L3Harris — an update that, in that account, caused the system to reboot and crash — and Bloomberg reported the FBI was examining whether a software update triggered the outage while not believing a cyberattack or crime was involved. Officials have confirmed neither report, and by early Saturday the FAA still had not released a formal technical finding; its next national airspace update was due at 6 AM Eastern. The honest summary, as of Friday night: overloaded switches and routers in an aging system are the administration’s working account — a mechanism, not yet a proven cause.

The disruption numbers grew through the afternoon, and they are worth keeping separate, because each was counted at a different hour and in a different way. FlightAware’s early count, reported by Reuters, was nearly 7,000 flights delayed or cancelled. By 8 PM Eastern, FlightAware was counting more than 10,000 flights delayed and 5,000 cancelled in the United States. The Wall Street Journal’s running tally of delayed or cancelled flights passed 13,000 by evening. And the counting is not finished: the FAA said at least 900 flights scheduled for Saturday had already been cancelled, with that number still growing — aircraft and crews ended Friday far from where Saturday’s schedules assumed they would be.

By early Saturday, the counts had moved well past those Friday-evening figures, and they still do not line up — each tracker, and each hour, counts differently, so they are kept separate here and none is a final total. FlightAware, as read at about 1:33 AM Eastern Saturday, put Friday’s cancellations at 8,785 among flights within, into or out of the United States, with 2,602 cancellations already counted for Saturday. A later Saturday report, citing FlightAware via Portugal’s PÚBLICO, put Friday at 9,122 cancelled and 6,999 delayed to and from the United States, and Saturday at 3,273 cancelled and 780 delayed. Reuters, using the separate tracker FlightRadar24, put Friday at more than 6,600 flights cancelled and 8,600 delayed. The carrier-specific ground stops that followed the nationwide halt also wound down overnight — the last of them, for American Airlines flights to Chicago O’Hare, was cancelled at 1:27 AM Eastern, leaving none tied to the outage on the FAA’s advisory list.

The stop itself was lifted at about 8:30 PM Eastern, roughly four and a half hours after it began. Departures resumed, with flights released in coordination with the Command Center as the en-route facilities recovered. Lifting the order restarts the system; it does not unscramble it, and airlines and the FAA both expect the effects to run through the weekend.

The scramble reached Saturday’s college football schedule within hours. Texas was at the airport in Austin, ready to depart for its game at LSU, before deplaning and returning to campus. Utah, ranked No. 2, went back to campus as well. Arizona State sat on its plane hoping to travel to Orlando to play UCF, then changed plans — the Sun Devils now fly Saturday morning, according to ESPN.

Friday’s halt was the first nationwide ground stop of all departures since January 11, 2023, when a failure of the FAA’s pilot-notification system grounded flights for several hours. Before that, the only comparable event was the closure of the entire airspace after the September 11 attacks. Reuters notes the context this happened in: an air traffic control system beset in recent years by equipment failures, communications problems, and shortages of controllers, while the FAA works to replace aging infrastructure. On Friday afternoon, the whole country got a demonstration of how much of American life runs through that system — and how quickly it all stops when the system does.

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The wire reports:

The Saturday fallout:

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