A telecommunications failure in the air traffic control systems forced the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States to order a complete halt to all outgoing flights in the country on Friday, grounding thousands of aircraft and impacting over 7,000 flights due to delays and cancellations.
The FAA declared a national air emergency citing "extraordinary circumstances and safety reasons," marking just the third event of this kind in the history of U.S. aviation, following the attacks on September 11, 2001, and a technical incident in January 2023.
"There has been a temporary interruption of telecommunications. As a precaution, all flights have been halted. Each flight has been accounted for, and international flights will be handled on a case-by-case basis," the FAA communicated through its official account.
The agency explained that the interruption affected the air traffic control centers that manage traffic between airports throughout the national territory, and specified that the measure was taken "with the utmost caution possible."
According to a report from CNN, the disruptions are affecting both air traffic control radars and radio frequencies, which stop functioning simultaneously.
According to a source familiar with the matter, the controllers are unsure about the cause of the failure or what is exactly happening.
The order established that aircraft already in the air could proceed to their destinations and land normally, but no aircraft on the ground could take off until further notice.
The Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, dismissed the incident as a threat to the country's security.
"There are no signs or reason to believe that this was a threat to the United States. It was a telecommunications disruption at the FAA," he stated to the press at the White House.
Mullin also denied any connection to the massive outage from Microsoft that had affected millions of users worldwide the day before, disrupting email services, video conferences, banks, hospitals, and railways. "I see no reason to link these two events. They are separate incidents," he stated.
The official also noted that the solution would not be quick: "It won't be resolved and turned around in an hour."
The president Donald Trump was informed of the situation and had a phone conversation with the Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, who was the first to publicly announce the halt.
The measure caused chaos in the country's main airports. At Newark Liberty International Airport, hundreds of passengers were waiting in Terminal A without precise information about when flights would resume; some travelers arriving from Toronto chose to look for accommodation in New York to spend the night.
At Chicago O'Hare, where restrictions had begun before the national order due to "equipment disruption," the atmosphere was calmer, although the airline ANA offered meal vouchers to passengers with delays of two hours on flights to Tokyo.
American Airlines warned that its operations would experience disruptions for the rest of the day. "It will be a team effort to get customers on their way as soon as possible when the FAA lifts this shutdown," the company stated in a press release.
The most recent precedent for a similar measure occurred in January 2023, when a failure in the FAA's pilot notification system (NOTAM) —caused by the accidental deletion of files during maintenance work— halted departures for less than two hours and resulted in over 10,000 delays nationwide.
At the time of the available information's closure, the FAA had not formally confirmed the lifting of the national grounding order.
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