Federal Aviation Administration: Flight suspension across the United States has been lifted

The Federal Aviation Administration said on the evening of the 13th local time that it had lifted the flight suspension order across the United States.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a directive that afternoon saying that due to communication failures at multiple air traffic control centers, flight departures across the United States were suspended.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Duffy said at the White House that night that U.S. airspace had reopened at 20:15 Eastern Time, and flights would gradually resume. Airlines will take some time to resume normal operations, and "the recovery process will be slow."

Regarding the cause of the failure, Duffy said that the air traffic control system currently in use is old and the system was overwhelmed by data overload, resulting in inconsistent data provision, so he chose to shut down the system.

According to US media reports, the grounding order issued by the US Federal Aviation Administration that day lasted for more than four hours, resulting in a large number of flight delays or cancellations and a large number of passengers stranded at the airport.

According to data from the flight tracking website FlightAware, as of 23:00 EST on the 13th, 8,173 domestic and inbound and outbound flights in the United States were delayed and 7,507 flights were cancelled.

According to reports, nationwide ground groundings are "very rare." The last time it happened was in January 2023 due to a failure of a critical computer system; the last time it happened was on September 11, 2001 because of a terrorist attack on the United States.