FAA lifts ground stop at US airports, allows flights to resume after outage

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Washington: A nationwide ground stop was canceled by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after a telecommunications outage brought flight depart...

Reagan National Airport near Washington last month. (Craig Hudson/For The Washington Post)

Washington: A nationwide ground stop was canceled by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after a telecommunications outage brought flight departures across the US to a halt, according to a notice on their website, clearing the way for airlines to resume operations after more than four hours.

The ground stop was lifted at 8:15pm Friday evening after the communications failure affected air traffic control centers across the country. Airlines now face the challenge of restoring their schedules after the shutdown, with delays and cancellations potentially rippling through the aviation system for hours as carriers work to get aircraft and crews back into position.

"Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data, and they went down,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a news conference. "And I shouldn’t say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”

The rare nationwide halt, only the third in US history, came as the FAA grapples with aging air traffic control infrastructure and mounting pressure to modernize its systems. The agency had initially ordered all departing flights to remain grounded until further notice, citing extraordinary circumstances and safety concerns.

"It’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon,” Duffy added.

Duffy said earlier Friday that the communications issue affected all air route traffic control centers, which manage aircraft flying at high altitudes. The FAA attributed the disruption to a temporary telecommunications outage, though the precise cause remained under investigation.

"We had over 3,500 airplanes in the air,” Duffy said at a news conference. "They all engaged, and last time I looked, we had less than 400 in the airspace as they were all coming in to safely land, and we navigated it with our well-known…

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