Equipment failure caused nationwide US ground stop, says Transportation Secretary

“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system. The president, for the last year, has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a brand-new air traffic control system,” he said.

“Our routers actually got overloaded with data, and … they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”

Duffy called on Congress to approve “emergency funding” to overhaul the US air traffic control system – some parts of which still run on floppy disks – and called for $50 billion in funds, up from $30 billion asked for previously.

“I’ve asked, the president’s asked for $30 billion. I want $50 billion,” he said. “What’s more important than having an air traffic control system that actually works?

“And so, the president said, ‘You know what? Let’s finish this job. New hardware, new software, new telecommunication’.”

While aircraft on the ground were held there due to the communication failure between US Air Route Traffic Control Centres (ARTCCs), those already en route were allowed to continue and land at their destinations.

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“We had over 3,500 airplanes in the air. They all engaged, and last time I looked, we had less than 400 in the airspace as they were all coming in to safely land. And we navigated it with our well-known procedures that that we have when these incidents happen,” said Secretary Duffy.

“We started to have inconsistency in the data from the radars and our communication with airplanes, and we have procedures for this.”

Flights from Australia to the US were cancelled due to the outage, with Sydney Airport on Saturday grounding all US-bound services.

“We are aware of the nationwide ground stop issued by the US Federal Aviation Administration and are monitoring the situation closely,” an airport spokesperson said.

“At this stage, all US-bound flights due to depart Sydney Airport are grounded and passengers travelling to or via the United States should check with their airline for the latest information regarding their flight.”

As of 8pm US Eastern time (12pm AEDT), 9,814 flights had been delayed and 5,117 cancelled into, within, or out of the US, according to data from FlightAware. Secretary Duffy said recovery to normal operations would be slow, but the hope was to get as many flights as possible moving Friday night.

“If not, we’re going to start tomorrow morning with our airline partners moving those aircraft. But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon … hopefully, tomorrow we are going to start to see far better movement,” he said.

“I think we’re going to be back up and operational as we come into the heat of travel during Thanksgiving.”

The nationwide ground stop was the second since the September 11 attacks, with a “damaged database file” in the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system delaying more than 10,000 flights during a 90-minute stop in January 2023.