U.S. FAA halts departures nationwide for safety reasons
Key Facts
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration ordered a halt to departing flights at all airports across the country on Friday afternoon, Nov. 13, citing “exceptional circumstances” and “safety reasons,” Axios reported. An air traffic control directive instructed that all departing flights remain grounded until further notice. The order covered departures nationwide, while incoming international flights were not subject to a blanket ban. The guidance said those flights would be handled case by case. The measure therefore affected passengers and airlines across U.S. airports, with no end time specified in the published directive.
The directive focused on halting takeoffs and gave no time for resumption, stating that the pause would continue “until further notice.” That meant the order gave passengers and carriers no announced timeframe for determining when departures would resume. By contrast, handling incoming international flights case by case provided a separate track from the halted takeoff traffic. Axios quoted the guidance for those flights as saying they would be handled “case by case.” The announcement cited safety considerations and exceptional circumstances, without further details in the published information about the reason for the order.
The Federal Aviation Administration did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment, the agency reported. The published report offered no further explanation of the circumstances behind the order, beyond describing them as exceptional and citing safety reasons. The directive also did not specify when the halt would be lifted or announce other operational arrangements for resuming flights. As a result, operational instructions for departures remained tied to waiting for a new notice. The handling of incoming international flights was the other operational detail in the report, through an assessment of each flight individually.
The United States experienced a nationwide halt to departures on Jan. 11, 2023, after an outage in the pilots’ notice system, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s historical timeline. The agency then ordered airlines to delay departing flights shortly before 7:30 a.m., and lifted the order at about 9 a.m. The outage’s effects on airlines continued through the rest of the day. By early evening on the East Coast, more than 1,300 flights had been canceled and 9,000 delayed, according to FlightAware data cited by the Associated Press. Those figures relate to the 2023 incident and do not describe the impact of the Nov. 13 order.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it is accelerating an upgrade to the pilots’ notice system, noting that a major outage in January 2023 highlighted the system’s fragility and the need to speed up its modernization. The agency described that outage as having exposed “the system’s fragility and the need to accelerate the upgrade.” This context links a previous disruption in technical infrastructure with the modernization efforts announced by the agency. For Friday’s order, the available directive prioritized safety and halted departures until further notice, while handling incoming international flights case by case. The published report did not specify when departures would resume.
In separate economic news released the same day, the U.S. Producer Price Index for final demand rose 0.3% in October on a seasonally adjusted monthly basis, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That followed increases of 1.4% in September and 0.4% in August. For the 12 months ended in October, final-demand prices rose 6.5%, the largest annual increase since a 7.4% rise in November 2022. In October, prices for final-demand goods rose 0.5% and services prices rose 0.2%. Prices excluding food, energy and trade services also rose 0.5% for the month, matching September’s increase, and were up 4.9% for the 12 months ended in October.