Communications Outage at 22 Centers Halts U.S. Flight Departures, Diverts 600 Flights
Key Facts
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a nationwide halt to departures on Friday, November 13, after a communications outage affected 22 regional air traffic control centers, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said. Duffy said the centers direct aircraft between airports and that agency technicians were investigating the problem. The agency said all flights had been accounted for and international flights would be handled case by case. Officials gave no clear timetable for resuming departures, while the stop order remained in effect until at least 11 p.m. Eastern time. The outage’s broad reach raised operational concerns as flights already in the air continued to land.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin described the incident as a communications outage and said there were no indications at that point of a malicious attack. He added that some communications systems remained able to operate "at certain levels," while others were under strain, and the cause of the outage was not yet known. The Federal Aviation Administration said flights were accounted for, while United said flights already in the air would continue and international departures would be handled case by case. American Airlines said it expected disruptions to continue for the rest of the day and would work to rebook customers once the halt was lifted. The investigation into the cause of the outage remained separate from determining when operations would return to normal.
The order’s effects extended to transatlantic flights, as Europe’s aviation authority suspended departures bound for the United States at the request of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, from 5 p.m. Eastern time until midnight. The authority manages air traffic in 42 member countries on the continent, bringing departures from a broad area outside the United States under the restrictions. The U.S. agency said international flights would be handled case by case, while coverage available at the time did not detail arrangements for each flight. On the U.S. side, data from Cirium cited by the Associated Press showed at least 600 flights had been diverted by the time of the report. As of 5:50 p.m. Eastern time, 496 flights had returned to their departure airports, while 104 had been sent to a different airport.
The expected volume of traffic added to the disruption’s complexity: about 11,000 flights were scheduled to depart U.S. airports after 4 p.m. Eastern time, carrying more than 1.5 million passengers. In one case, a flight from Wichita to Chicago remained on the runway for about an hour before returning to the gate. After passengers disembarked, the airline said rebooking would not begin for at least an hour. American Airlines expected disruptions to continue through the end of the day and was working to rebook customers once the halt was lifted. These events show how the impact extended from departure restrictions to diversions and rebooking delays, with no timetable for resuming operations.
This was the first nationwide departure halt since a major computer system at the Federal Aviation Administration failed in January 2023, and the second since the September 11, 2001, attacks. The Government Accountability Office said an outage in the agency’s pilot-notification system on January 11, 2023, led it to halt nationwide departures for about two hours. The outage then caused more than 1,300 cancellations and delayed about 10,000 other flights during the day. That provides historical context for the scale of measures the agency may take when systems affecting air traffic safety fail. The office also said the agency’s 2023 assessment covered 138 air traffic control systems, 51 of which were classified as unsustainable and 54 as potentially unsustainable.
The incident renewed attention on a program to modernize U.S. air traffic control technology. The project began after Congress approved 12.5 billion dollars the year before the Associated Press report, while Duffy said completing the work would require an additional 30 billion dollars. The agency said the White House was pressing Congress to approve the additional funding. As officials investigated the cause of the outage, the Associated Press said they were examining whether it was linked to the rollout of a new artificial intelligence system to help the agency identify problems and reroute aircraft. But a later update quoted Mullin as saying the communications problems did not appear to be related to the SMART system, while the company that designed it denied the halt resulted from the system, its products or its integration with the agency and air traffic control.