US sky chaos: What brought 11,000 flights to a halt?

Washington: Trump administration officials said Friday that new technology being added to the nation's air traffic control system overloaded antiquated systems and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, leading to the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years.

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It was lifted Friday night after a five-hour stretch when most flights were not allowed to take off from airports in the United States.

Thousands of flights and potentially over a million travellers were affected from coast to coast. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House that no one was in any danger as more than 3,000 flights were safely landed. But Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said he could not guarantee it wouldn't happen again.

Mullin said the FAA was installing “new equipment, new technology” and “it was overwhelming the older system.” There appeared to be no indication of a cyberattack, Mullin said.

A limited number of domestic flights began departing Friday evening after the ground stop was lifted, but it would likely take days for airlines to fully recover because so many planes and crews were out of position. Officials said they think the system will be back to normal in time to handle the Thanksgiving travel rush.

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The nationwide ground stop was the first since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system malfunctioned, and the second since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Mullin says no sign of nefarious act

Asked whether he could rule out a cyberattack or rogue artificial intelligence incident, Mullin said: “There's nothing completely certain right now. It doesn't appear that way.” He said there are no “footprints” showing an attack and that it appears to be “mechanically driven,” adding that officials were still looking for the cause.

At least 827 flights had been diverted. As of 7:05 pm EST, 670 flights were sent back to the airport from where they originally took off, while 157 were redirected to a different airport, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company.

The airports where many of the flights ended up being diverted included Washington Dulles International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport and Nashville International Airport.

Some 11,000 flights carrying more than 1.5 million passengers had been scheduled to take off from airports in the US after 4 pm EST.

At the time of the ground stoppage, 3,500 airplanes were in the sky, Duffy said.

“And last time I looked, we had less than 400 in the airspace,” he said. He said it's going to be slow getting air traffic back to normal.

At Chicago O'Hare Airport on Friday afternoon, travellers passing through security learned about the ground stop when they looked up at screens that showed flight delays across the board.

Some called friends or family members, debating whether to stay the night in Chicago or find another way to their destinations.

Amber McQuilkin, 27, sat on a bench, disappointed that she might miss a trip with friends to New York for the League of Legends world finals. Her friends, she said, had already arrived there.

“There's not really any information being passed to me,” said the Seattle software engineer, who took a week of vacation for the trip. “I contemplated just abandoning the flight and driving, but then the more I thought about it, the more I'm like, that would be miserable.”

Austin Curtis and his wife were rethinking their trip from South Bend, Indiana, to a friend's baby shower in Denver after getting delayed during a layover in Chicago.

They had boarded a flight to Denver from O'Hare International Airport when they were told to get off the plane.

“We did see them taking luggage off our plane and others, so we're assuming it's going to be a pretty substantial delay,” Curtis said.

They were unsure whether to get a hotel room or keep waiting out the delay at the airport. With care already in place for their two young children at home, they might stay the weekend in Chicago, he said.

Sports teams stranded and cargo flights delayed

NBA, NHL and college teams were left stranded as they tried to reach their destinations. Meanwhile, NFL teams were left to wonder whether the issue would be resolved in time to travel to their games this weekend.

Duffy said NCAA teams will be prioritized ahead of football games on Saturday.

“I would encourage those football teams to reach out to the FAA, to schedule their flight times and make sure they can move” to make their kickoff, he said.

Cargo flights were also delayed by the ground stop.

FedEx, the world's largest cargo airline, said it was prepared to activate contingency plans to keep any possible disruptions at a minimum.

US airlines move about 61,000 tons (55,340 metric tonnes) of goods — from letters to packages — to and from more than 220 countries daily, according to the industry trade group Airlines for America.

Despite the ground stop, SpaceX launched its Starship rocket from Texas on Friday afternoon in its latest test flight.

Past problems have also been linked to equipment failures The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast, although that disruption was linked to a construction crew cutting a fiber optic line. Aging equipment was also blamed for the brief radar outages last year that disrupted Newark airport.

Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said the difference this time is that it happened on a nationwide scale that left controllers unable to reliably talk to pilots.

“If you don't have that ability, whether it's because the old wires that they have are just run down or for whatever reason, you've got to stop airplanes on the ground and not put them in the air, where you're going to risk not being able to communicate with them,” said Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot.

Friday's ground stop was also different than the one after 9/11 because planes were not being told to land immediately and pilots likely were able to communicate with ground controllers at airports, Arroyo said.

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