US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced on Friday the grounding of all departing flights from American airports due to a communications issue affecting air traffic control centers across the country.
Duffy said Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) technicians are investigating the communications problem, affirming that authorities will provide immediate updates as soon as more information becomes available.
CNN quoted the FAA as saying that the decision to ground departing flights resulted from communications issues impacting several air traffic control centers.
Is the cause a cyberattack?
Initial reports indicate that this is not a cyberattack, according to two law enforcement officials cited by CNN.
The last time the United States experienced a complete ground stop of flights was in January 2023, when a pilot notification system suffered an outage. Prior to that, the last nationwide ground stop was issued following the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to the American network.
Earlier, the FAA had issued an extremely “rare order” halting air traffic nationwide across all airports due to “exceptional circumstances” and “safety reasons,” according to Axios.
The air traffic control statement read: “All departing aircraft must remain grounded until further notice,” adding that “incoming international flights will be handled on a case-by-case basis.”
7,000 flights canceled
According to the flight-tracking website FlightAware, nearly 7,000 flights in the US have been delayed or canceled as a result of the FAA’s decision to suspend flights nationwide.
Technical glitch or terrorist act
For her part, an aviation expert suggested that the FAA’s decision to ground all departing flights in the United States was likely caused by a technical glitch rather than a terrorist act.
In remarks to CNN, aviation expert Mary Schiavo noted that the FAA had announced earlier today that it was preparing to activate a new artificial intelligence-based tool called SMART (Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Traffic) to help manage air traffic across the entire US airspace.
Schiavo explained that new computer systems sometimes face difficulties interfacing with legacy systems, pointing out that incompatibility between the systems could be behind the issue that led to the ground stop.
She added that one of the objectives of the SMART system is to manage air traffic mid-flight, providing a great deal of facilitation and flexibility.
She stressed that no information has emerged so far indicating that the FAA’s decision resulted from threats or a terrorist act, suggesting the cause is likely newer computer systems attempting to interact with older ones.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that notices related to the air traffic control system disappeared from an FAA website.
The air traffic tracking site Flightradar noted that approximately 3,100 aircraft are currently en route to US airports amid the ground stop on departures, adding that no flights have taken off from those airports.
