FAA Lifts Nationwide Ground Stop After Communications Failure Halted U.S. Flights for Hours
Updated 9:41 p.m. ET Friday: Duffy blamed the shutdown on aging equipment. “What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” he said at the evening briefing. “Our routers actually got overloaded with data and … they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down,” CBS News reported . The FAA has not released a formal technical finding. Disruption carried into the night at several airports. FAA advisories show ground stops limited to specific carriers’ flights: United to Chicago O’Hare ( extended to 10:45 p.m. ET) and Newark ( cancelled at 9:34 p.m. ET), Alaska Airlines to Seattle and San Diego (through 10 p.m. ET), and Delta to Minneapolis-St. Paul (through 10:15 p.m. ET). An FAA operations plan said several of the stops are “at airline’s requests,” that its stakeholder hotlines will stay open overnight, and that the next status update on the national ai...