Washington : A ground stop has been issued for all flights across the United States due to “extraordinary circumstance and reasons for safety” after authorities reported serious air traffic control communications issues.
The order means flights in the air may land, but flights on the ground cannot take off. FlightRadar showed that planes were still landing.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued the nationwide ground stop “following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centres”.
“FAA technicians are investigating the issue,” he said. “We will provide immediate updates as we have them.”
The ground stop was issued on Friday afternoon (US time). The cause of the system failure was not immediately clear.
CNN reported that two law enforcement officials said preliminary information indicated a cyberattack was not to blame.
It is only the third time in US history that a nationwide ground stop has been ordered; the first was during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the other was in 2023 when the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions system failed.
The 2023 outage lasted about 12 hours in total, although departures were able to resume after about 90 minutes.
Friday’s ground stop will impact thousands of flights and hundreds of thousands of passengers: US airspace handles around 45,000 flights a day.
Shortly before the announcement, the FAA halted traffic in Chicago due to air traffic control communications issues.
Last year, US Congress approved $US12.5 billion ($18.5 billion) to fix the FAA’s ageing communications system, and on Friday the FAA and White House asked Congress for another $US30.1 billion to address other issues.
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