US Flights Halted for 5 Hours After Communications Failure; 11,000 Flights Scheduled
Key Facts
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center ordered a nationwide ground stop on November 13, covering all airports and facilities, citing a communications failure. The halt lasted about 5 hours before restrictions were lifted Friday evening, according to the Associated Press. During that period, most flights were not permitted to take off from U.S. airports. About 11,000 flights carrying more than 1.5 million passengers were scheduled to depart after 4 p.m. Eastern time, the agency reported. The White House announced a statement by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on the halt that same day, under the heading "Everyone Is Safe."
Mullin told reporters at the White House that more than 3,000 flights landed safely while the halt was being addressed, adding that no one was in danger. Diversion figures show the disruption to flights that had already departed: by 7:05 p.m. Eastern time, 670 flights had returned to their airports of origin and 157 had been diverted to other airports, according to the Associated Press. Authorities lifted the restrictions after the FAA said it had "thoroughly tested" its systems to ensure they were stable and reliable before allowing flights to resume. But permission to depart did not end the disruption to airline schedules, as aircraft and crews remained outside their usual positions. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that it would take time for air traffic operations to return to full capacity.
Officials linked the problem to new technologies interacting with older infrastructure in the air traffic control network, rather than to the AI-powered system cited in reports about the network’s modernization. The Associated Press said officials reported that new technology being added to the air traffic control system had "overloaded parts of the old system," causing "intermittent" gaps in communications and radar. By contrast, the transportation secretary said the new AI-powered system was not connected to the outage. Officials’ explanation thus focused on the strain on older components as additional technologies were introduced, while the official reason for the ground stop was a communications failure. This explanation puts the reliability of the existing technical infrastructure at the center of the investigation into how service was disrupted nationwide.
The incident comes amid earlier signs of challenges in modernizing FAA systems. In an assessment reported in 2024, 51 of 138 systems in the air traffic control network were classified as unsustainable, while another 54 were identified as potentially unsustainable, according to a Reuters report based on the U.S. Government Accountability Office. A separate outage in the pilot safety notification system had previously led to a nationwide ground stop on January 11, 2023, for about two hours. That outage, according to the Government Accountability Office, led to the cancellation of more than 1,300 flights and delays to nearly 10,000 more that day. The earlier incident differed from the November halt, but both disrupted departures nationwide because of a technical failure in FAA systems.
The effects of Friday’s halt extended into the following day: more than 2,500 flights within the United States were canceled on Saturday, November 14, with hundreds of delays continuing, according to the Associated Press. The agency said it could take airlines days to restore full operations because many aircraft and crews were out of their usual positions. Officials expected the system to return to normal before Thanksgiving travel, the report said. On the day of the disruption, the White House and Transportation Department asked Congress for an additional $30.1 billion to modernize airports and air traffic control, including $10.1 billion to modernize air traffic control systems, according to Reuters. The funding requests put network modernization among the proposed steps after the outage exposed an operational vulnerability whose effects continued after the ground stop was lifted.