Air traffic: Nationwide take-off ban in the USA lifted after four hours

The nationwide ban on flights in the USA was lifted after just over four hours. The US aviation safety authority FAA stopped air traffic throughout the USA on Friday evening. Flights had not received permission to take off “until further notice”. Incoming international flights were assessed on a case-by-case basis. The authorities initially cited “extraordinary circumstances” and security reasons as the reasons. The FAA initially did not provide any further details.

At a press conference at the White House late Friday evening, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said an outdated aviation security system and routers overloaded with data were to blame for the outage.

New systems would overwhelm the old equipment, said the Secretary of Homeland Security. The current air traffic control system would have to be completely replaced. Mullin also emphasized that Congress must release the funds to finance a major update of these systems. Duffy said he expects more outages like this in the future.

Republicans have a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Last year, they allocated $12.5 billion to overhaul the FAA's aging communications system through the Big Beautiful Bill. Just on Friday, the FAA and the White House asked Congress for $30.1 billion to address other problems.