FAA Lifts Nationwide Ground Stop but Warns Flight Chaos Will Persist Through the Weekend

The Federal Aviation Administration has lifted a nationwide ground stop that paralyzed U.S. air travel for more than four hours, but officials warned that flight cancellations and delays will continue to disrupt passengers through the weekend as airlines struggle to recover from the unprecedented disruption.

The ground stop, which took effect at 3:54 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, was triggered by a telecommunications outage that affected air route traffic control centers across the country.

The FAA confirmed the order was cancelled shortly after 8 p.m. ET, with the agency stating on its website: “The FAA Command Center nationwide ground stop has been cancelled”. The restriction had been in place for four hours and 26 minutes.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters that the outage was caused by a contractor replacing old copper wire with fiber optic cable, which overloaded antiquated equipment and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps.

“Our contractor didn’t meet the moment,” Duffy said, blaming L3Harris Technologies Inc. for the failure . He added that officials were investigating whether contractor “incompetence” or a faulty router was the cause.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin sought to reassure the public that the incident was not an attack.

“There is no indication, and we had no reason to believe as of right now that this was a threat to the United States,” Mullin told reporters at the White House. “There’s no reason for the public to be afraid or scared for your loved ones”.

The disruption was massive. More than 4,700 flights were cancelled and 10,000 delayed on Friday, while another 700 had already been cancelled for Saturday, according to FlightRadar24.

Aviation analytics firm Cirium estimated that about 11,000 flights carrying more than 1.5 million passengers were still scheduled to depart from U.S. airports after 4 p.m. ET on Friday . At least 827 flights were diverted during the ground stop.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the U.S. air travel schedule should return to normal by the end of Sunday, two days after what was the nation’s longest ground stop in 25 years. He said airlines “will still have delays and cancellations” on Saturday but promised that the “worst is behind us”.

The nationwide stop was the first since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Aviation consultant Andrew Charlton noted the cascading impact: “The aircraft doesn’t just fly from A to B and back to B and then stop.

It then moves onto C and then over to E and around and around and around. It is, of course, exacerbated if you’re talking about long-haul flights, international flights over the Atlantic or over the Pacific”.