The FAA ground stop ended on Friday evening, more than four hours after a communications failure halted departures at airports across the United States. The order took effect at 3:54 p.m. Eastern time on November 13 and kept planes on the ground until further notice. Flights started moving again after 8 p.m., but airlines warned that cancellations and delays would run into the weekend.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued the order in Advisory 111, which cited “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” The FAA ground stop was only the second time the agency had halted departures across the country since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The other nationwide halt came in 2023, when a computer outage kept flight crews from receiving safety alerts.
What caused the FAA ground stop
The FAA said the stop followed “a temporary telecommunications outage” and that every flight had been accounted for. Officials described the failure as a rolling frequency outage, a series of breakdowns in the radio systems that pilots and air traffic controllers use to talk to each other. The exact cause remained under investigation on Friday night.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters the cause was a telecommunications outage and said new technology had overwhelmed an older system. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Congress must provide more money for air traffic control technology, which he described as decades old and largely analog. Mullin said there was no indication of an attack so far, but officials were not ruling anything out.
The stop began shortly after the FAA halted traffic in Chicago over communications problems. The agency’s public status pages did not show a nationwide stop at first, and it did not immediately answer questions from news outlets about the cause. By 5:05 p.m., the FAA said the stop followed a temporary telecommunications outage.
Advisory 120, signed at 5:46 p.m. Eastern time, allowed some departures to resume under FAA coordination. The formal cancellation came in Advisory 005, which lifted the command-center restriction for all airports and facilities. By then, some flights were already moving again after hours on the ground.
Airlines face days of FAA ground stop fallout
The FAA ground stop left FlightAware counting 7,365 cancellations for Friday within, into or out of the United States, along with more than 25,000 delays. The count kept rising through the evening as airlines worked through backed-up schedules. By late Friday, the service also showed 1,758 cancellations for Saturday.
American, Delta, Southwest and United said they were restarting operations after the FAA ground stop was lifted. Three narrower carrier and destination stops were still listed at 10:30 p.m. Flightradar24 counted 4,042 flights in the air and bound for United States airports when the order was issued, and more than 600 flights were diverted in the first two hours.
Flightradar24 said 3,100 aircraft were bound for United States airports when the order took effect, with no additional planes taking off. The halt also rippled into Canada, where delays were expected at Toronto Pearson, Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal-Trudeau and Calgary.
Travelers face a slow FAA ground stop recovery
Officials said it would take several days for travel to return to normal after the FAA ground stop. Aircraft and crews were out of position after hours on the ground, and airlines had to rebuild schedules flight by flight. Passengers were told to check with their airline before heading to the airport.
Early figures from Reuters put the combined number of delayed and canceled flights at nearly 7,000 during the afternoon. That number grew as the FAA ground stop stretched past four hours. The disruption came on a Friday, one of the busiest travel days of the week, which left little slack in airline schedules.
The advisory that ended the FAA ground stop was signed at 8:19 p.m. Eastern time, four hours and 25 minutes after the first order. Some departures had already resumed under FAA coordination before the formal cancellation. The agency said updates would continue on its National Airspace System status page.