US flights resume after communications outage grounds planes for hours

The US Federal Aviation Administration has said flight departures can now resume after it lifted a nationwide ground stop due to a communications problems, reported news agency AP. The nationwide ground stop was the first since January 2023, when an FAA computer system failure halted flights.

Before that, the last nationwide stoppage followed the September 11 attacks in 2001. On Friday evening, all flights in the US had been grounded for several hours and hundreds of airplanes were diverted due to "extraordinary circumstances", said FAA officials.

The disruption was caused by communications problems at regional air traffic control centres. The US FAA had halted departures from airports across the United States on Friday after communications problems hit regional air traffic control centres.

The agency said the decision was made keeping the safety of workers and passengers as technicians investigated the outage. "There has been a temporary telecommunications outage – out of an abundance of caution all flights have been halted.

Every flight has been accounted for and international flights will be handled on a case by case basis," the FAA had posted on X during the outage. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the affected centres directed aircraft travelling between airports.

Flights already in the air were allowed to land, and officials said all had been accounted for. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication the outage was an attack and that no one was ever in any danger.

He described it as a telecommunications problem and said some systems had been overwhelmed. Officials were handling aircraft in the air individually to ensure they landed safely. “This isn’t the same comparison to 9/11,” Mullin said, rejecting comparisons with the 2001 attacks.

He said the president had been briefed and urged people not to speculate about the cause. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin are briefing reporters in the White House after the FAA ground stop was lifted after 8 p.m.

ET Friday. Flights within Alaska and Hawaii were not affected, Alaska Airlines was quoted by AP. The disruption also affected international travel. Air Canada cancelled its US flights for the rest of Friday evening and warned that some services between Canada, the Caribbean and South America could be affected if they used US airspace.

Europe’s aviation agency suspended US-bound departures at the FAA’s request from 5 pm until midnight Eastern time. Mexico’s aviation agency said scheduled flights from Mexico to the US were grounded. The stoppage extended to cargo operations because the FAA order applied to departing flights at US airports.

FedEx said it was monitoring the situation and was ready to activate contingency plans. The company said it would resume normal flight operations as soon as the FAA allowed. The disruption was attributed to old air traffic control technology and overloaded routers and circuits.

AP quoted Mullin as saying that the communications outage was caused after introduction of some new new technology into an old air traffic control system. "The system was overwhelmed," he said. The precise trigger of the outage is still unclear and is being investigated.

Mullin further said that the US aviation communications system needs a complete overhaul with an estimated cost of $50 billion. The Express Global Desk at indianexpress.com which delivers authoritative, verified, and context-dri...

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