The FAA Just Ground Stopped Every Flight in America

Photo: U.S. Federal Aviation Administration / Public domain

The FAA did something Friday afternoon that almost never happens in this country. It stopped everything.

At 3:54 p.m. Eastern, the Air Traffic Control System Command Center issued Advisory 111, a national ground stop covering every airport in the United States. Every departing domestic flight was ordered to stay on the ground until further notice. Planes already in the air were not ordered to land, but nothing new was allowed to take off.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the stop followed a communication issue affecting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the facilities that handle planes traveling between airports across the country. The FAA said its technicians were investigating the cause. American Airlines told its customers the FAA was working to resolve a technical issue affecting telecommunications at many air traffic control facilities across the country.

At about 4:19 p.m., Flightradar24 counted roughly 3,100 aircraft in the air and bound for U.S. airports while departures sat frozen on the ground. The FAA advisory listed an effective window running to 11:30 p.m. Eastern, and the agency gave no estimate for when normal operations would fully return. If you are traveling tonight, check with your airline, because an end time printed on an advisory is not a promise that your flight is leaving.

Here is the part that should stop everybody cold. This is only the second time since the September 11 attacks that the FAA has ordered a ground stop like this across the entire country. The first one shut down American aviation on the worst day in modern history. That is the company this afternoon now keeps.

And it did not take an attack to do it this time. It took a communications failure inside the system that is supposed to be the backbone of the safest air network on earth. One failure, and the whole country is standing in a terminal staring at a departures board.

This is what years of treating the FAA like an afterthought gets you. The controllers in those centers do an impossible job keeping millions of people safe with systems that have needed serious investment for a long time. When the backbone breaks, it is not the politicians who pay for it. It is the family missing a funeral. It is the worker losing a shift. It is thousands of regular people sleeping on an airport floor tonight.

The flights will move again. The question is whether anybody in charge learns a thing from this, or whether we just wait for the next failure and act surprised all over again.

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