A nationwide ground stop imposed by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) brought flights at airports across the country to a sudden halt on Friday before being lifted several hours later. Officials blamed ageing communications equipment and warned that the disruption highlighted the need for urgent investment in the air-traffic control system.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy initially said a communications problem had affected all Air Route Traffic Control Centres. Later, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said technology upgrades had overwhelmed antiquated equipment.
“It’s going to continue to fail,” Mr Mullin warned during a White House briefing on Friday night.
Mr Duffy said the restoration pointed to a failure involving a legacy network. “Our fix gives us a pretty good indication that it was a legacy network problem that went down,” he said.
The officials said there was no indication that the ground stop was caused by a cyberattack, although Mr Mullin acknowledged that “there’s nothing certain right now”. He also ruled out terrorism, saying: “This isn’t another 9/11.”
Mr Duffy called on Congress to provide emergency funding to replace the FAA’s ageing systems. He said the Trump administration needed an additional 30 billion US dollars, later putting the figure at 50 billion dollars.
European airlines face bomb threats
The disruption in the United States came during a week in which airlines in Europe were hit by a series of apparently false bomb threats. At least one flight was diverted to a military base in France, although the threats appeared to be hoaxes.
Spain’s Foreign Minister, Jose Manuel Albares, said Europe appeared to be facing “hybrid aggression and a form of psychological warfare”.
The FAA ground stop was not linked to a separate Microsoft outage that affected email, collaboration and artificial intelligence functions, the company said. The National Weather Service also said its radar systems had not been disrupted, rejecting online suggestions that they had caused the FAA communications failure.
The FAA last ordered a nationwide ground stop in 2023, after files connected to a pilot alert system were accidentally deleted. Thousands of flights were delayed before operations resumed.
Earlier this year, flights at airports in New York were halted after a contractor accidentally cut a fibre communications line in New Jersey.
The latest disruption came just days after the FAA announced plans to deploy an artificial intelligence tool to assist air-traffic controllers.
