At 5:15 p.m. PT, the Federal Aviation Administration “lifted” today’s nationwide grounding of thousands of flights.
According to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the root cause of the crisis was a radar “instability” issue that led to the shutting down at 12:54 p.m. PT of domestic airspace this afternoon. The ground stop lasted almost five hours, with little information from officials and rumors running amok as to what happened and was it nefarious.
Since the FAA issued a rare grounding Friday, over 3,500 flights were taken out of the air. It is estimated from LAX to JFK and everywhere in-between that 1.5 million passengers are stranded at airports across the country. With information being so tight from the feds before tonight’s White House briefing, a “software update” has been floated as one possible explanation as has an AI system uploading.
Now with the radar issues put in focus, on a practical level the 22 FAA-run Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs) appear to have communication problems. The spill over into the overall system seemed to be unknown, which is why a full-scale shutdown was ordered.
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In great part, the antiquated system was overwhelmed, Duffy said at a ramshackle White House briefing after the ground stop ceased. “It was the old hardware that went down” as routers overloaded, the Real World: Boston alum added of the 1980s and 1990s tech heavy system. “None of the new systems went down,” Duffy made a point of noting.
All cable news networks went live with the briefing following continuous coverage of the ground stop, which was widely viewed online too.
“It is going to continue to fail,” Duffy asserted of the current system. Last year, the GOP-run Congress allocated over $12 billion to upgrade the admittedly aging air traffic system in Donald Trump‘s One Big Beautiful Bill.
However, as Duffy turned the White House briefing into a partisan praise-a-thon of “builder” Trump and a demand for $50 billion more to upgrade the air traffic system, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin would not rule out today’s disruption was a cyber attack or AI attack.
“We are still looking, and we’re not going to rule it out,” the former Oklahoma Senator declared. “We have seen zero evidence that this was a cyber attack or SI (Trump’s Super intelligence phrase) attack,” he added when pressed by reporters
“Things seem to be working, as we say, in the right direction,” DHS Secretary Mullin said after the FAA made its decision to reopen the skies.. “We hope to have operations up and running as normal.”
With that, both cabinet secretaries said it would take a while for flights to get back on schedule, with most planes likely to get up and going on Saturday morning. Pitching his $50 billion plan repeatedly, Duffy said that an economic analysis of the grounding has not yet been done, but will be undertaken.
Trump himself has not commented on the grounding, a fact Mullin tried to justify by stating the former Apprentice host’s M.O. was to put “leaders in place and allows them to lead.”
Still, with 5,000 cancellations already announced, Delta has cut flights for the rest of the day, with more airlines expected to do so before the ground stop was lifted. During the shutdown today, a handful of international flights are being allowed, as are flights in and around Alaska and Hawaii because they run on different communications systems.
In a show of retail politics, the Transportation Secretary encouraged sports teams seeking to play games tomorrow to “reach out the FAA” to get them to their destinations
Like they did on 9/11 over 25 years ago, Canada has said they will take in diverted US flights. On the flipside, international airports out of Vancouver (which usually sees a heavy Hollywood contingency on Friday nights as talent and producers head home to L.A. for the weekend) and Montreal are seeing “cancellations to U.S. destinations.”
Today’s shutdown was the third time that a nationwide FAA flight shutdown has occurred. The first time was in the aftermath of the terrorist attack of 9/11 in 2001. The second time was on January 11, 2023 when the s Notice to Air Missions system (which permits pilots to speak to the ground) failed.
