The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a nationwide ground stop for departing flights at US airports on Friday, November 13, after communications problems affected the country's air traffic control network. The order was issued at 20:54 UTC (3:54 p.m. Eastern Time) and instructed aircraft operators to keep departures on the ground until further notice.
The disruption affected the 22 regional Air Route Traffic Control Centers responsible for managing aircraft between airports. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said FAA technicians were investigating the problem. The agency has not identified its technical cause or announced a confirmed time for normal operations to resume.
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The FAA said international flights arriving in the United States would be handled individually. Aircraft already airborne were not ordered to land immediately, although controllers continued to manage traffic under the restrictions.
A rare nationwide interruption
A nationwide ground stop is an exceptional measure in the United States. The previous comparable interruption occurred in January 2023, when a failure of the FAA's pilot notification system halted departures across the country.
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The latest outage comes days after Air Data News reported that US controllers still rely on decades-old information systems, including equipment that the FAA does not expect to replace fully until 2028. There is no evidence that those particular systems caused Friday's failure.
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The FAA is conducting a multibillion-dollar modernization of communications, radar and other air traffic control equipment. Officials have not established whether the current disruption is connected to any previously identified weakness in the network.
In September, a separate UK flight-control system failure caused widespread cancellations after a failure in flight-plan processing. That incident involved a different national system and has not been linked to the US disruption.
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The US ground stop affects departures nationwide and is expected to disrupt airline schedules beyond the duration of the restriction. An independently verified count of flights delayed or cancelled specifically because of Friday's outage was not yet available at the time of this report.
