FAA says cause of nationwide ground stop remains unknown
After communications instability prompted a four-hour flight halt on November 13, officials described router problems but said they had not identified the fault.
The Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide on Friday, November 13, after unexplained communications instability raised concern that air traffic sensors could lose contact with aircraft. At a briefing in Washington on Saturday, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said officials still did not know the root cause.
- The ground stop lasted more than four hours, Fox News reported, citing Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s remarks.
- Bedford said officials could not explain the instability and were unwilling to risk a sensor losing connectivity with aircraft.
- Airlines canceled thousands of flights on Saturday as they worked through the disruption; the FAA expected schedules to return to normal by Sunday’s end.
Why the FAA halted flights
Bedford said officials saw instability in the system but could not explain how it might spread. He said the FAA feared that propagation could cause a sensor to lose connectivity with aircraft. The agency chose to stop departures while that risk was unresolved, he said.
The stop lasted more than four hours, according to Fox News’ account of Duffy’s remarks. The Associated Press, in a report republished by Hindustan Times, described the shutdown as the nation’s longest ground stop in 25 years. The safety rationale was the risk of unreliable communications between controllers and pilots, rather than a confirmed finding that a sensor had failed.
Routers were under scrutiny, but no fault was established
Officials reported problems involving routers and networking equipment, including products and services from Cisco and L3Harris Technologies. Bedford said routine router replacements involved replacing Cisco 600 routers with Juniper routers, and were separate from the FAA’s modernization allocation.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy described one possible mechanism: a router being replaced during a transition from copper to fiber may have flooded other routers in the air traffic control system. Hindustan Times, citing HuffPost, reported that Duffy said officials had not determined whether the fault was user error, installation error or a faulty router. That explanation remained a possibility under investigation, not a final technical finding.
L3Harris said it was supporting the FAA investigation into the conditions behind the November 13 ground stop and took the effects on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously. The company also said it and other technology firms had completed more than 70% of a planned conversion of airspace communications from legacy copper wires to fiber-optic systems.
The modernization effort is distinct from the router replacements Bedford discussed. CNBC reported that Duffy had requested $50 billion from Congress for an air travel overhaul, while Bedford described a separate FAA modernization effort with a $12.5 billion allocation.
Thousands of flights disrupted as airlines recovered
The Associated Press reported that airlines canceled thousands of flights across the United States on Saturday as they recovered from the halt. Passengers were left scrambling for seats, and travel disruptions reached beyond the United States. The FAA’s expectation, reported by Fox News and the AP, was that the U.S. schedule would return to normal by the end of Sunday, November 15.
The AP report compared Friday’s nationwide disruption with a September communications outage in the Northeast that was linked to a construction crew cutting a fiber-optic line, as well as earlier brief radar outages attributed to aging equipment. Those incidents provide context for vulnerabilities in air traffic infrastructure, but do not establish the cause of this ground stop. Officials had not identified the fault at the Saturday briefing.
Read in depth: World
Ice warnings cover parts of Scotland and northern England from Sunday evening
Yellow ice warnings are due to run from 6pm Sunday to 10am Monday, with forecasters warning of hazardous travel and cold-health alerts starting separately.
UN Security Council adopts Yemen sanctions resolution by consensus
The UK says the measure strengthens arms embargo implementation, with members set to work on controls covering dual-use items in coming months.
What this story rests on
4 sources from 3 organisations: 2 news agencys, 1 broadcaster, 1 newspaper or magazine.
- 1'Root cause’ of nationwide ground stop is unknown, FAA saysCNBC · cnbc.comBroadcaster
- 2FAA says air travel should be back to normal Sunday after nationwide ground stopFox News Digital; report credits The Associated Press with contributing · foxnews.comNews agency
- 3US flights to return to normal by Sunday after nationwide ground stop, FAA saysHindustan Times, republishing Associated Press reporting · hindustantimes.comNews agency
- 4Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blames FAA nationwide ground stop on ‘contractor error or faulty equipment’Hindustan Times; cited remarks attributed to HuffPost · hindustantimes.comNewspaper or magazine
AI-assisted article checked against the listed sources. NewsJaws did not conduct interviews or attend the reported events.
Researched and drafted with AI tools from these sources, then checked against them paragraph by paragraph before publication. How we work · Everyone we cite · Report an error