The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop on Friday (13 November) after a communications failure at air traffic control centres caused chaos at airports and triggered the longest nationwide shutdown since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said U.S. airspace reopened at 20:15 Eastern Time (01:15 GMT), 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. Duffy said he and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had met with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss the outage.
The failure is the latest and most dramatic sign of strain on a U.S. air traffic control system beset by aging technology, equipment and communications problems and a shortage of several thousand controllers.
Duffy said the trouble began at 15:36 Eastern Time, when air traffic control centres experienced instability in radar and communications systems.
“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.
He added that at no stage did they completely lose radar or communications and they 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 aging air traffic control system was needed to prevent similar failures.
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