The United States has reopened its airspace after a communications failure at air traffic control centres caused widespread disruption at airports across the country, triggering the longest nationwide shutdown since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted the nationwide ground stop on Friday, several hours after the failure forced authorities to suspend flights.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that US airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time (0115 GMT), but warned that flight departures would resume gradually and normal operations could take time to restore.
“It’s going to be slow,” Duffy told reporters at the White House.
More than 6,600 flights were cancelled and 8,600 delayed, while another 1,500 had already been cancelled for Sunday, according to FlightRadar24.
Aviation analysts warned that the four-hour nationwide grounding could disrupt airline schedules for several days.
Duffy said tens of thousands of passengers were stranded at airports across the country. He added that he and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss the incident.
The failure represents the latest and most significant indication of mounting pressure on the US air traffic control system, which has been affected by ageing technology, equipment and communications problems, as well as a shortage of several thousand air traffic controllers.
Duffy said the disruption began at 3:36 p.m., when air traffic control centres experienced instability in their radar and communications systems.
“Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they started to give us inconsistencies in the data from those routers and because of that we shut the system down,” Duffy said.
He added that authorities never completely lost radar or communications capabilities and were able to land thousands of aircraft safely.
The transportation secretary said the immediate technical problem had been resolved and flying was safe. However, he stressed that a broader overhaul of the ageing air traffic control infrastructure was necessary to prevent similar incidents.
Duffy blamed Congress for failing to provide sufficient funding for a replacement system, which he said could prevent similar disruptions, and called for $50 billion to modernise the country’s air traffic control infrastructure.
Earlier on Friday, before the outage, the White House and the Department of Transportation had urged Congress to approve $30.1 billion to upgrade ageing airports and air traffic control facilities across the country.
“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said.
“Give us the money to fix it.”
Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Mullin said there was “zero evidence” so far that the disruption was caused by a cyberattack or a rogue artificial intelligence system, although investigators had not ruled out either possibility.
“It appears this was mechanically driven, however, we’re still looking,” Mullin said.
He disclosed that the National Security Agency was working with the Department of Homeland Security on the investigation.
The outage appeared to have affected a telecommunications network overseen by L3Harris Technologies, according to two airline officials.
The network manages critical radio frequencies used by air traffic controllers to communicate with pilots.
L3Harris Technologies had not responded to a request for comment.
Faridah Abdulkadiri
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