The United States (US) reopened its airspace on Friday after a communications failure at air traffic control centres forced the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to halt flights nationwide, disrupting thousands of journeys, while Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called on Congress to provide $50 billion in emergency funding to overhaul the country’s ageing air traffic control system.
The FAA lifted the nationwide ground stop allowing flights to resume. However, Duffy warned that airlines will take time to restore their operations and clear the backlog of disrupted journeys.
“It’s going to be slow,” Duffy told reporters at the White House.
According to FlightRadar24, more than 6,600 flights were cancelled and another 8,600 delayed following the disruption. Airlines had also cancelled 1,500 flights scheduled for Sunday. Aviation analysts said that the four-hour nationwide grounding could affect airline schedules for several days.
Duffy stated that tens of thousands of passengers remained stranded at airports across the country. He added that he and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had met President of US Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss the incident.
The disruption began when air traffic control centres experienced instability in their radar and communications systems. Duffy said that overloaded switches and routers caused inconsistencies in the data transmitted through the network, prompting officials to shut down the system.
“Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they started to give us inconsistencies in the data from those routers and because of that we shut the system down,” he said.
Duffy said that authorities had not completely lost radar or communications during the incident and managed to land thousands of aircraft safely. He added that officials had fixed the immediate problem and that flying remained safe, but added that the incident showed the need to replace the ageing air traffic control infrastructure.
Calling for emergency funding, Duffy urged Congress to allocate $50 billion for the overhaul.
“This is an emergency. I want Congress to give us emergency funding … I want $50bn,” he stated.
On Friday, the White House and the Department of Transportation had urged Congress to approve $30.1 billion for upgrades to the country’s airports and air traffic control infrastructure.
Mullin said that investigators had found no evidence that a cyberattack or a rogue artificial intelligence system caused the outage, although authorities had not ruled out either possibility.
“There is zero evidence” of such an attack, he said, adding that the incident appeared to be mechanically driven. The National Security Agency was working with the Department of Homeland Security on the investigation.
Despite the lifting of the ground stop, passengers continued to face cancellations and delays at airports from Boston and New York to Seattle and Los Angeles.
US airlines will not have to compensate passengers stranded by the disruption because the carriers were not responsible for the FAA system failure.
The only other nationwide ground stop since the September 11, 2001 attacks took place in January 2023, when the FAA halted domestic departures for around 90 minutes.
The disruption also affected airline shares, with American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines falling between one percent and two percent in after-hours trading. JetBlue Airways shares dropped around three percent.
