{"id":230657,"date":"2026-11-14T08:50:06","date_gmt":"2026-11-14T08:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/faa-grounds-us-flights-nationwide-after-communication-issue-al-jazeera\/"},"modified":"2026-11-14T08:50:06","modified_gmt":"2026-11-14T08:50:06","slug":"faa-grounds-us-flights-nationwide-after-communication-issue-al-jazeera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/faa-grounds-us-flights-nationwide-after-communication-issue-al-jazeera\/","title":{"rendered":"FAA grounds US flights nationwide after \u2018communication issue\u2019 – Al Jazeera"},"content":{"rendered":"

US officials say air control centres affected by \u2018communication issues\u2019, but no threat detected.<\/em>
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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has lifted a nationwide ground stop<\/a> that halted departing flights across the United States for more than four hours after a \u201ccommunication issue\u201d affected air traffic control centres.
The FAA announced at 8:15pm Eastern time on Friday (01:15 GMT on Saturday) that it had lifted the order, after it issued the ground stop hours earlier at 3:54pm (20:54 GMT).<\/p>\n

Airlines are facing delays and cancellations as they get aircraft and crews back into position.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the problem to ageing infrastructure and instability with air traffic control radar and communications systems.
\u201cOur switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they started to give us inconsistencies in \u200cthe data from those routers,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd because of that we shut the system down.\u201d
Secretary Duffy added that at no stage did they completely lose radar or communications. The problem is fixed and flying is safe, he insisted.
More than 10,000 flights were delayed and at least 4,000 cancelled, according to FlightAware, CBS News reported. About 1.5 million passengers were affected, according to the AP news agency.<\/p>\n

Some 4,042 flights were in the air, heading to US airports, when the ground stop was ordered, according to the tracking site Flightradar24.
The communication issue affected all 22 air route traffic control centres, which guide aircraft.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters there was no indication that the ground stop was triggered by a threat to the US.
\u201cEverybody\u2019s safe. The flights are accounted for,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is not another 9\/11.\u201d
US President Donald Trump has not addressed the situation and has remained absent from the public scene since the FAA announced the ground stop.
Trump has been \u201cfully engaged\u201d in responding to the nationwide flight shutdown, Mullin said after a reporter asked during a White House news conference why the president had not spoken publicly about the disruption.
\u201cI don\u2019t run the president\u2019s comms,\u201d Mullin replied, saying Trump had been in regular contact with senior officials since the crisis began.
Mullin also said the president had spoken with officials multiple times and had been briefed on developments throughout the disruption.
The homeland security secretary also defended Trump, saying the president had been pushing for an overhaul of the country\u2019s ageing air traffic control infrastructure.
Asked whether a planned rollout of a new AI tool meant to help air traffic controllers could be to blame, Mullin said officials have not ruled it out. \u201cYou just can\u2019t rule out anything at this point. We are going through that process,\u201d he said.
The FBI does not believe a cyberattack or criminal activity caused the failure, Bloomberg reported, citing an official familiar with the matter.
The cited official said investigators were examining whether a software update could have caused the outage, though the cause had not been determined.
Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth has called for a \u201cthorough and complete investigation\u201d of the reported FAA communication issues.
\u201cThe safety of our skies is built on redundancies. Whatever led to the nationwide ground stop will warrant a thorough and complete investigation,\u201d Duckworth wrote in a post on X.
\u201cAs Aviation Subcommittee Ranking Member, I\u2019ll be demanding answers from the FAA,\u201d she added.
The disruption is the latest sign of strain on the US air traffic control system, which has \u2060been beset by equipment failures, communications problems and \u2060shortages of controllers, as the FAA tries to replace ageing infrastructure.
Air Space Intelligence (ASI), the company behind the FAA\u2019s AI-powered air traffic management system, said its technology was not responsible for the nationwide ground stop.
\u201cThe current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC,\u201d the company said in a post on X.
The FAA awarded ASI an $875m contract in June to develop and deploy the SMART system, which uses artificial intelligence to support air traffic management.
The agency announced an expansion of the system across its 22 air traffic control centres on November 10, just days before the nationwide flight suspension.
Amtrak, the US national rail operator, announced that its website and app are showing error messages and that customers are having difficulty reaching a representative, as it faces higher-than-normal call volumes because of the nationwide disruption to air travel.
\u201cWe apologize for the error messages on both our website and app, as well as the difficulty reaching a representative,\u201d Amtrak said in a post on X in response to a complaint.
\u201cWe\u2019re currently experiencing higher-than-normal call volumes due to ongoing airline issues,\u201d the company said.
It recommended that customers try the services later.
Pilot and former FAA safety team representative Kyle Bailey told Al Jazeera: \u201cWhether you are an expert or not, the bottom line is we\u2019re still trying to piece the puzzle together, and it would be impossible to have an answer to the issue quickly, in a few hours at least.
\u201cBut it is very alarming what we saw, and possibly [rail operator] Amtrak is being affected too,\u201d he added. \u201cThe FAA\u2019s priority at the moment is keeping not only the American passenger safe, but everyone flying in the US flight system.\u201d
Bailey said that \u201chalting the flights on the ground is the safest thing to do until they could figure out what\u2019s going on. If anybody says they think they know what\u2019s causing this problem at such an early stage, they\u2019re not being honest.\u201d
Congress approved $12.5bn for the overhaul last year, and the Department of Transportation and the White House asked lawmakers on Friday for \u2060another $30.1bn.
This was the first nationwide US ground stop since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system malfunctioned. Before that, the last time had been after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
US authorities have yet to determine the cause of the telecommunications outage that prompted the ground stop.<\/p>\n

Follow Al Jazeera English:<\/p>\n

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US officials say air control centres affected by \u2018communication issues\u2019, but no threat detected.SaveShareThe Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has lifted a nationwide ground stop that halted departing flights across the United States for more than four hours after a \u201ccommunication issue\u201d affected air traffic control centres.The FAA announced at 8:15pm Eastern time on Friday (01:15 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":230658,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}