US officials blame routine maintenance, FAA says root cause unknown— All about America’s longest ground stop since 9/11

The US aviation system is slowly recovering after a nationwide flight shutdown on Friday. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials have blamed it on routine maintenance gone wrong.

The FAA had issued a nationwide ground stop that halted nearly all departing flights for almost five hours, marking the longest nationwide halt to air travel since the attacks of 11 September 2001.

No flights were allowed to take off from the continental US for more than four hours from 15:54 EST (19:54 GMT) on Friday. However, some international flights were permitted to depart US airports during the shutdown in an apparent effort to clear space.

Federal Aviation Administration head Bryan Bedford predicted on Saturday that operations would largely return to normal by late Sunday, apologising for the disruption and noting that the system is now stable.

Passengers stuck on tarmac amid mass cancellations

The disruption caused massive travel chaos across the country, leaving tens of thousands of passengers stranded in airports. In some cases, passengers were left stuck inside planes on the tarmac, unable to take off or return to the gates.

According to aviation website FlightAware, airlines had cancelled more than 6,150 US flights and delayed over 7,300 by Saturday evening. This followed Friday's staggering toll of approximately 9,200 cancelled and 7,500 delayed flights.

Major carriers were significantly impacted on Saturday, with Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and American Airlines cancelling about 25% of their flights, while JetBlue cancelled nearly 45%.

The chaos also disrupted weekend sports travel, forcing the rescheduling of college football and basketball games, as well as NBA and NHL travel.

Officials blame routine maintenance for the outage

The unprecedented disruption prompted the White House to convene an emergency meeting in the Situation Room on Friday to determine if it was a cyberattack.

However, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy clarified that the issue stemmed from routine maintenance at a remote FAA facility.

Duffy explained that the problem was traced to FAA contractor L3Harris, which was updating telecommunications lines from copper wire to fibre optic cable. “It was such an old wire that it was being discontinued,” Duffy noted. The installation of at least one new router led to data flooding and overloading other communications centres.

“We had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, and what that did was [it] gave us issues with our communication with airplanes, and it also caused some disruption with our radar,” Duffy told reporters, noting that the issue affected communications at 17 of the FAA's 22 en route centres.

Explaining the drastic decision to issue the grounding order, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford stated, “Because of our lack of identifying the root cause, we were unwilling to take any risk that this propagation could actually result in a sensor losing connectivity with aircraft.”

"What we're working to determine is whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installer error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router? We haven't determined what the fault was," Duffy added.

Both Duffy and Bedford firmly ruled out a cyberattack. "I want to reiterate: we see zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related," Bedford stated.

Ageing infrastructure and funding demands

The incident has highlighted the strain on a US air traffic control system beset by ageing technology and a shortage of controllers.

"It’s not just old equipment – we have an incredibly old telecommunications system," Duffy said on Saturday, calling for an overhaul. He requested $50 billion in funding to upgrade the systems, a significant increase from his earlier request of $30 billion.

L3Harris, the federal contractor involved, released a statement saying it takes the ground stop and its negative effects "seriously." The company noted it had completed over 70% of the planned airspace communications conversion and is supporting the FAA's investigation.

Meanwhile, political pressure is mounting. Democratic Representatives Rick Larsen and Andre Carson promised that their panels will "hold the administration accountable," while New York Governor Kathy Hochul called for Duffy's resignation and a full congressional investigation into the disruption.

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