US aviation agency lifts nationwide ground stop affecting all air travel

Resumen detallado

Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, said the airspace was now open and the problem had been identifiedChaos at US airports as stoppage grinds travel plans to a haltWhat to…

Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, said the airspace was now open and the problem had been identified

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has lifted a nationwide ground stop that was declared Friday afternoon, delaying or canceling more than 11,000 US flights, according to aviation tracker FlightAware, and throwing airports into sudden chaos.

The FAA confirmed the airspace was open in an advisory on its website. “So at 8.15 tonight, Eastern Time, we’ve opened up the airspace,” Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, said. “But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon.”

Duffy said that the federal government has “identified the problem” that brought down the US air traffic control system on Friday and the system “is operational right now”.

The White House briefing Friday evening with Duffy and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, quickly turned into a plea for funding from Congress to “fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system”.

“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said. “Our routers actually got overloaded with data, and … they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down,” he added.

Earlier Friday, Duffy said in a social media post that the stoppage was due to “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers” and that the FAA’s technicians are looking into the matter.

A notice from the FAA said the ground stop was being imposed “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety”.

Duffy said that more than 3,500 airplanes were in the air when the ground stop was issued.

Inicio del artículo, extracto de The Guardian Business. Para leer el resto, abra el artículo en el sitio del medio.