WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 – Flights across the United States are slowly resuming after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted the longest nationwide ground stop since the September 11, 2001 attacks, triggered by a communications failure that hit air traffic control centres across the country.
The FAA halted all departing flights at 3:54pm Eastern Time on Friday (8:54pm Ghana time), citing “extraordinary circumstances”. Airspace reopened at 8:15pm ET (1:15am Ghana time on Saturday), more than four hours later, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.
It was only the second nationwide stoppage of all departures since 9/11, according to the BBC and Al Jazeera.
Thousands of flights disrupted
Thousands of flights were cancelled and more than 8,500 delayed on Friday, according to FlightAware data cited by the BBC. Aircraft already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations, while international flights were handled case by case.
The disruption spread beyond the US. All US-bound traffic from Eurocontrol’s 42 member states was suspended during the stoppage, and some flights from London Heathrow to the US were cancelled or delayed, the BBC reported. Air Canada also cancelled flights between the US and Canada.
‘An old system’
Mr Duffy said a legacy air traffic control communications system had become overloaded. “Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down,” he said.
“We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines. It’s an old system that went down and went down everywhere. It got overloaded,” he added, calling for an estimated $50bn overhaul of the system.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was “zero evidence” of a cyber-attack and ruled out any link to the global Microsoft outage that began on Thursday. “Everybody’s safe. The flights are accounted for,” he said. “This is not another 9/11.”
Delays expected for days
Mr Duffy warned that the outage would have a ripple effect for a few days. “It’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon,” he said. Delta Air Lines and United Airlines said they were resuming operations, and JetBlue said it would restart flights on Saturday morning.
Travellers from Ghana heading to the US or connecting through American airports this weekend are advised to check their flight status directly with their airlines before setting off for the airport.
Sources: BBC, Al Jazeera, MyJoyOnline.
Featured image: The air traffic control tower at Orlando International Airport. Photo: Olga Ernst / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
