Flights across the U.S. were 'all stopped' for 4.5 hours due to communication difficulties... Aftereffects continue (3 steps overall)

Across the United States, on the afternoon of the 13th (Eastern time), aircraft operations across the country were virtually halted for over four hours due to a problem with the aging air traffic control and communication system.

There was chaos at airports across the U.S. ahead of the weekend due to an unusual situation in which flight operations across the U.S. were halted for several hours.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a nationwide ground stop at airports across the U.S. at 3:53 p.m. Eastern time on this day (5:53 a.m. on the 14th, Korean time) due to a communication problem affecting the air route control center.

Ground stop is an air traffic flow management measure issued when unexpected situations such as runway closure occur at the destination airport. When a ground stop is issued, the subject aircraft must wait on the ground until further takeoff instructions are issued.

The FAA's nationwide ground suspension was lifted at 8:15 p.m. Eastern U.S. time on this day (10:15 a.m. on the 14th, Korean time), about 4 hours and 20 minutes after it was issued.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pointed out that the aging system was the cause of the control communication system failure at a White House briefing held immediately after the ground suspension was lifted.

“At 3:36 p.m., radar and communications became unstable at air traffic control centers and terminal radar approach control (TRACON) across the country,” Duffy said. “The radar data and communications with the aircraft began to become inconsistent, and at that point we issued a ground stop.”

Minister Duffy said, “The aging system was overloaded and went down,” and added, “None of the newly installed equipment went down.”

Minister Duffy said that the fact that the system was normalized as a result of modifications to reduce overload on the network switch suggests that an old network problem was the cause of the failure, and criticized that the root cause of this situation was the Congress's failure to allocate sufficient budget for air traffic control system improvement.

“There is absolutely no evidence that this was a cyber attack or an artificial intelligence (AI) attack,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullen said at the same briefing.

Minister Duffy said that about 3,500 aircraft were in operation at the time the grounding ground was issued. After the ground suspension was issued, there were 30,000 aircraft scheduled to take off from US airports during the day.

According to FlightTrader24, a flight tracking site cited by Reuters, more than 4,700 flights within the United States were canceled and 10,000 were delayed on the 13th. 700 flights scheduled for the 14th have already been canceled.

Aviation analysts said it could take several days for airlines to normalize their flight schedules in the wake of a nationwide suspension that lasted more than four hours, Reuters reported.

The last time the FAA implemented a nationwide flight suspension was on January 11, 2023. At the time, contractor employees accidentally deleted files related to the warning system used to communicate with pilots, delaying the takeoffs and landings of thousands of flights for about 90 minutes.

Prior to this, the nationwide suspension of flight operations occurred in 2001, when the September 11 terrorist attacks occurred.

Reuters pointed out that this was the longest nationwide flight suspension since the September 11 terrorist attacks.