FAA Announces Ground Stop For All Aircraft Across the Entire United States

WHAT TO KNOW

The FAA has ordered all aircraft across the entire United States that are not already in the air to be ground stopped until further notice due to tech issues affecting air traffic control systems.

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The ground stop is now not expected to be lifted until 11 pm EST.

The cause of the tech issues have yet to be identified.

Tens of thousands of passengers are stranded on aircraft because there is no gate space for them.

An unprecedented post-9/11 nationwide ‘ground-stop’ of aircraft across the United States has finally been lifted more than three hours after it began, with Trump administration officials already blaming a lack of congressional funding to replace antiquated equipment that powers air traffic control services across the United States.

Issues were first reported at around 3:30 pm when Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control Center entered a ground stop due to intermittent equipment outages before the problem appears to have spread across other air traffic control centers in quick succession.

Aircraft that were already in the air were allowed to continue, but any plane on the ground wasn’t allowed to take off while engineers raced to fix the yet-to-be-identified issue.

Tens of thousands of passengers were left stranded on aircraft as airports turned into giant parking lots.

In a statement posted to his official X account, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said: “The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.”

The statement added: “FAA technicians are investigating the issue. We will provide immediate updates as we have them.”

There are 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC) across the United States that manage high-altitude air traffic.

The FAA had initially hoped to have the ground stop lifted by 5 pm EST, which in itself should have resulted in massive knock-on effects, with widespread cancellations expected – Not just on Friday but continuing into the weekend.

In response to a request for comment, the FAA directed us to Secretary Duffy’s statement on X. An air traffic control advisory issued by the FAA told pilots that operations had been suspended due to “extraordinary circumstances.”

Meanwhile, United Airlines told us: “United Airlines is responding to a nationwide ground stop issued by the FAA. United flights that are already airborne will continue. New domestic flights will not depart while the FAA ground stop remains in place.”

The statement continued: “United will work with our customers to get them to their destinations once this issue is resolved.”

The latest air traffic control crisis dwarfs the problems that affected the Northeast in September when blundering construction workers cut through a newly installed fiber backup line used by a major air traffic control center, known as a TRACON, in Philadelphia.

It’s difficult to describe just how much disruption a ground stop of this nature could cause. This kind of outage could have a monumental impact on airline operations for days, even if the issue is resolved in a relatively short time.

Now that the ground stop has been lifted, it will take a long time to get aircraft back up in the air, and at that point, crews could be running out of legal hours, aircraft will be out of position, and those kinds of logistical issues will quickly cascade across airline networks.

The most immediate issue is that planes full of passengers are using taxiways as parking lots because airports don’t have enough gates for all these aircraft to return to and allow passengers to deplane. In other words, this could be an incredibly long night for anyone trapped on one of these planes.

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