Airports are slowly recovering the morning after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted its nationwide ground stop for domestic flights for about four hours, causing thousands of delayed and canceled flights.
The stop began around 4 p.m. ET on Friday, with officials citing “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety” for the sweeping stoppage.
It was just the second time since 9/11 that the FAA issued a U.S. ground stop — the other came in 2023 after a computer outage prevented flight crews from receiving critical safety alerts.
Officials called the interruption a “rolling frequency outage,” which is a series of cascading failures in the radio communication systems that pilots and air traffic controllers use to talk to each other.
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At a Friday evening press briefing, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed the decades-old “analog” technology that the U.S. air traffic control system runs on, saying that “our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data” and eventually had to be shut down.
He also used the opportunity to tout the Trump administration’s efforts to modernize FAA systems — and insist that Congress fund further efforts to update air traffic control technology, including a recent AI-powered update that officials have not ruled out as being responsible for Friday’s chaos.
On Tuesday, the FAA began using its new Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories system, an AI system that helps route planes at all of the nation’s 22 major air traffic control centers. Air Space Intelligence, the company that ships SMART, denied responsibility on Friday evening.
“You will have more of these unless you, the American people, and Congress, tell us to build,” Duffy said at the press briefing. “And I can’t wait for that.”
Asked why the agency didn’t prepare for such a catastrophic failure given its concerns about the older technology, Duffy said they didn’t “anticipate” such a large-scale issue.
“I can’t anticipate every catastrophic failure that will happen with a TDM network, with an analog network,” Duffy said.
Despite the massive disruption to travel, Homeland Security Secretary Markwaye Mullin said “the public was never in danger through this process” due to the actions the government took to ground flights.
The flight-tracking service FlightAware had recorded more than 25,000 delays — roughly five times more than average — and 7,000 cancellations on Friday.
Officials acknowledged that it would take several days for travel to return to normal.
“I think we‘re going to be back up and operational as we come into the heat of travel during Thanksgiving,” Duffy said.
This story has been updated.
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