US grounds all departing flights amid comms failure at air traffic control centers
Homeland security chief says 'no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us,' as more than 1,000 departures cancelled and nearly 10,000 others delayed
US air regulators issued a rare nationwide ground stop for all departing flights on Friday due to a communications problem affecting air traffic control towers. According to the New Straits Times, the Federal Aviation Administration reported that the issue impacted all Air Route Traffic Control Centers, leading to immediate confusion for travelers. FAA technicians are currently investigating the matter.
The New Straits Times notes that while the FAA has previously issued orders for individual airlines due to communication issues, systemwide groundings are much less common. The outlet reports that a similar nationwide ground stop occurred in January 2023 caused by problems with the Notice to Air Missions system, an outage that lasted just under two hours. This Friday's order followed a request from US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to Congress for $30.1 billion to modernize the US Air Traffic Control System.
Brief written by urgent.news from Punch, Punch Nigeria, New Straits Times — 3 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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- US grounds all departing flights over air traffic control glitch punchng.com
- U.S. grounds flights nationwide after air traffic control communication outage globalnews.ca
- FAA grounds all flights at U.S. airports due to air traffic control communications problems pbs.org
- Flights grounded across U.S. due to outage affecting air traffic control, FAA says cbc.ca
