Airline schedules could be disrupted for days after all US flights grounded for hours

Detailed summary

FAA lifted the ground stop at 1.15am GMT on Saturday, but warned it would take ​time for airlines to restore normal operations ...

All departing US flights had been grounded after the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) issued a nationwide order on Friday, citing “extraordinary ​circumstance and reasons of safety".

Airports were thrown into chaos after a communications failure at air traffic control centres.

More than 6,600 flights were cancelled and 8,600 delayed, with another 1,500 already cancelled for Sunday, according to Flightradar24.

Aviation analysts said the four-hour nationwide grounding could disrupt airline ⁠schedules for days. It was the longest flight shutdown since the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

The FAA lifted the ground stop later on Friday, with transportation secretary Sean Duffy saying US airspace reopened at 8.15pm ET (1:15am GMT). But departures would ⁠resume gradually, and it would take ​time for airlines to restore normal operations, he warned. “It’s going to be slow.”

All US-bound departures from European airports were suspended until 5am UTC on Saturday, according to a notice published by the European traffic control agency, Eurocontrol.

US airlines, including American, United and Southwest, began resuming flights on Friday night. “Thank you for your understanding as we work as quickly as possible to fully restore normal operations,” Delta said.

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

The system was “incredibly old”, he 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.”

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Irish Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.