If you fly much, you’ve probably sat through a ground stop. A storm parks itself over one hub, the FAA tells flights bound there to stay put for an hour, and you get to know the gate area better than you’d like. It’s annoying, but it’s usually one airport and one weather problem.<\/p>\n
On Friday afternoon, the FAA did it to the entire country. An advisory from its Air Traffic Control System Command Center, timed at 2:54 p.m. Central (3:54 p.m. ET) by the local stations that published it, told aircraft operators that all U.S. airports were ground stopped for extraordinary circumstances and safety reasons. Departing traffic has to stay on the ground until further notice, and inbound international flights are being handled case by case.<\/p>\n
So what actually broke? I can’t give you a clean answer yet, and as of Friday evening the FAA hasn’t either.<\/p>\n
The agency’s statement, quoted by CNBC and Axios, pins it on communication issues at multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers and adds, “FAA technicians are investigating the issue.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted almost the same message on X, with one word swapped. In his version, the communication issue hit all of the centers.<\/p>\n
Does that one word matter?<\/p>\n
It does, a bit. Several centers having trouble is a bad afternoon. Every center losing communications at the same time would suggest something shared across the whole network, and that’s a pretty different kind of problem. I can’t tell you which version is right, and as of this writing neither the FAA nor Duffy has squared the two.<\/p>\n
The Command Center publishes a live National Airspace System Status page<\/a>, and it’s about as glamorous as a bus timetable. It’s also arguably the most useful thing the FAA puts online on a day like this, because it refreshes every five minutes.<\/p>\n When I reloaded it at 4:59 p.m. ET, the ground stop table had a single row. It listed ALL under airport, ALL under scope and EQUIPMENT \/ OUTAGE as the reason, tied to advisory 111. We couldn’t pull up the full text of that advisory on the FAA site, so I haven’t read it end to end.<\/p>\n Two more columns need a little decoding. UPDATE reads 0400, which is 0400 Zulu (aviation’s name for UTC), or 11 p.m. ET and 10 p.m. CT. That’s when the Command Center has the stop penciled in for its next review, and it isn’t a promise that planes will roll at 11. Then there’s POE, short for probability of extension, which reads MED. Basically, the FAA’s own planners rate the odds of this running past that update as medium.<\/p>\n The delay list underneath shows the spread. Chicago O’Hare, Newark and Teterboro all carried entries coded EQ:FAA, which appears to be the board’s shorthand for FAA equipment, while Atlanta’s line simply read NATIONAL STOP.<\/p>\n Think of your flight in three pieces. The tower gets you off the runway, an approach facility (a TRACON, in FAA-speak) handles the climb out and the descent in, and a center has you for the long, boring stretch in between. Axios described the centers the same way on Friday, as mostly in charge of the airspace up high, between airports. The FAA’s facilities directory<\/a> lists them by city, from Anchorage and Seattle to Miami and Boston.<\/p>\n So why stop departures if the trouble is up at cruising altitude? Pretty much every airliner climbs into a center’s airspace soon after takeoff, and the controllers there need to be able to talk to it. If those communications aren’t reliable, the safe move is to stop feeding new planes into the system and let the ones already up there come down. It’s a blunt tool, but it’s pretty hard to argue with.<\/p>\n That’s how it’s playing out. Reuters reported that flights already in the air can land while flights on the ground can’t take off, and Hartsfield-Jackson officials in Atlanta, via CBS News Atlanta, said the same about their own arrivals and departures. Reuters also reported that the FAA had halted traffic in Chicago over communications problems shortly before the national order.<\/p>\n I have to be a bit careful here, because the details are thin. The board says equipment outage, and the FAA’s statement says communication issues. CNBC, which reports the stop is disrupting hundreds of flights, also saw an internal Alaska Airlines message describing communications and radar issues. That’s the airline’s read of the situation, though, and not an FAA finding.<\/p>\n Some outlets have floated more specific explanations, from frequency problems to an exact count of affected centers, and I haven’t been able to trace those back to an FAA document. Until the agency names the hardware or software that failed, you’re better off treating any precise diagnosis with a healthy dose of skepticism.<\/p>\n The same goes for the restart time. News9 in Oklahoma City, citing the Command Center advisory, reported an estimated end of 10 p.m. Central, which lines up with that 0400Z update on the board. News9 also noted the FAA hasn’t confirmed a restart, and the official wording is still until further notice.<\/p>\n Reuters says this is only the second time since the September 11, 2001, attacks that every departure in the country has been held this way. The other one came on January 11, 2023, and it involved a completely different piece of the system.<\/p>\n That time it was NOTAM, the notice system that warns pilots about things like closed runways and broken lights before they leave. Billy Nolen, then the FAA’s acting administrator, said in congressional testimony<\/a> that he ordered the ground stop at approximately 7:15 a.m. EST and lifted it at 9:07 a.m. EST. The FAA’s preliminary findings pointed to contractors who accidentally wiped files while trying to fix a sync problem between databases, and Nolen said the agency hadn’t found any sign of a cyberattack.<\/p>\n Then there’s Newark. In spring 2025, the Philadelphia TRACON that guides planes in and out of Newark had a run of telecom and radio failures. According to ABC News, controllers’ screens went dark for somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds on April 28.<\/p>\n On May 11, the FAA described the trouble behind a 45-minute Newark ground stop as an audio issue rather than an outage, after the radio system misbehaved and controllers switched to a backup. That was one approach facility and one airport, though. Friday’s problem is at the centers, and the stop covers the whole country.<\/p>\n Reuters also noted that lawmakers set aside $12.5 billion last year to modernize the FAA’s old communications setup, and that on Friday the FAA and the White House asked Congress to add $30.1 billion more for other problems. I wouldn’t read too much into the timing. Nothing I’ve seen ties that request to this afternoon’s outage.<\/p>\n So if you’re stuck at a gate tonight, the time to watch is that 11 p.m. ET update. As of the Command Center’s 4:59 p.m. ET refresh on Friday, November 13, the national ground stop under advisory 111 was still on the board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you fly much, you’ve probably sat through a ground stop. A storm parks itself over one hub, the FAA … <\/p>\nSo what’s an Air Route Traffic Control Center?<\/h2>\n
Radar, radio or something else?<\/h2>\n
This has happened before, sort of<\/h2>\n