🎙 Why every flight in America was held | The Receipts - Dataspheres AI

Why every flight in America was held (5 min), with captions The story The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a nationwide ground stop on Friday, Novem...

Why every flight in America was held (5 min), with captions The story The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a nationwide ground stop on Friday, November 13, at about 4 p.m. Eastern, holding every departure in the United States for more than four hours. The FAA's alert cited "extraordinary circumstances and reasons of safety." The order was lifted shortly after 8 p.m., though reports differ on the exact minute. The cause has not been established. A ground stop keeps aircraft on the ground; it does not affect planes already in flight. More than 3,000 flights were in the air when the order came, and the FAA said every flight has been accounted for. The FAA said communication issues were impacting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the 22 facilities that guide flights above 18,000 feet, and later described the problem as a temporary telecommunications outage. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the stop in a post at 4:16 p.m. Eastern, writing that it followed "a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers." The FAA's own statement referred to multiple centers rather than all of them. A controller told Scripps News that word of a frequency problem and a ground stop at one East Coast airport came at about 3:36 p.m., and within minutes two more towers reported the same. FlightAware counts reported by NBC News show 99 cancellations on Wednesday and 1,024 on Thursday. By 7:30 p.m. Eastern on Friday, cancellations had reached 4,238 and were still rising. Officials said they had no sign of an attack. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House, "this isn't another 9/11," and said of a possible cyberattack, "as of right now, that's not known." On November 10, the FAA said a routing system it calls SMART was expanding to all 22 centers; the outage came three days later. The company that makes the system said the ground stop was not a result of it, and no link has been shown. This was the second nationwide ground stop since the attacks of September 11, 2001; the first, on January 11, 2023, followed a failure of a safety notice system and held departures for about an hour and a half. The stop's effects will outlast the outage. Planes are parked in the wrong cities and crews are reaching their duty-time limits, and CNBC reports cancellations will stretch into the weekend. Under the Transportation Department's refund rule, when an airline cancels a flight and the passenger is not rebooked or turns down the new flight, a refund is due, with the rule setting 7 business days for a credit card purchase. Highlights Highlight In pictures Listen The episode as audio