US air travel may not fully recover until Monday, transport secretary says

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered departing flights to remain on the ground across the US on Friday, 13 November, after communications problems affected regional air traffic control centres. The agency cited extraordinary circumstances and safety.

An air traffic advisory quoted by Axios said incoming international flights would be handled case by case. The stop did not require planes already in the air to land immediately, aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo told the Associated Press.

Nieuws.nl reported, citing ANP and Bloomberg, that the FBI believed the disruption did not appear to have been caused by a cyberattack. The bureau was investigating whether a software update had caused the outage, the report said. The cause has not been established.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin separately said there was no indication yet of a malicious attack.

It was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system malfunctioned, according to the Associated Press. At the time of the reports, there was no timetable for restarting departures.

Update

US air travel is expected to improve on Sunday but will probably not be fully back to normal until Monday, transport secretary Sean Duffy has said, after a nationwide ground stop disrupted flights across the country.

The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the stop on Friday evening, after more than four hours. But Duffy told ABC News on Sunday that aircraft and crews had been left out of position and would take time to get back where they were needed.

On Saturday, FAA administrator Bryan Bedford had said airlines expected to restore their full schedules by the end of Sunday. That was an assessment of airline schedules, while Duffy spoke more broadly about a return to normal air travel.

ABC News reported that, by late Saturday, FlightAware had recorded more than 9,000 flight cancellations on Friday and more than 6,400 on Saturday. Those figures do not establish how many cancellations were caused solely by the ground stop.

Duffy said investigators were examining a router installed during work to replace copper telecommunications lines with fibre. The precise cause of the network problem remained under investigation.