US flights grounded: Could Thanksgiving be next?

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently grounded all departing flights across the United States due to overloaded routers disrupting air traffic communications. This outage came just days after the FAA had lifted its nationwide ground stop. Officials have not ruled out further technical failures as millions of Americans are expected to travel for Thanksgiving, between November 20 and 30.

Airlines anticipate carrying around 2.7 million passengers every day during the 11-day Thanksgiving travel period. November 29 and 30 are expected to be the busiest days, with airlines adding an average of 38,000 seats daily compared to last year. November 29 and 30 will see over 8 million American Airlines customers and 500,000 United Airlines passengers.

The FAA expects the air traffic control system to operate normally by Thanksgiving. However, the larger concern remains the equipment that failed has not been completely replaced. The government has set aside $12.5 billion for air traffic control modernisation, and officials have called for an additional $30 billion to complete the work.

The outage on Friday was caused by an update to the private communications network operated by L3Harris, which overloaded the routers and led to inconsistent information being sent. While there is no indication of a cyberattack, officials have not provided a complete explanation of the failure.