The FAA, the agency that regulates civil aviation in the United States, lifted flight restrictions within the country on Friday (the 13th), after more than four hours of nationwide paralysis. The suspension affected thousands of flights and left passengers stranded at airports from north to south across the country.
According to the FAA, operations were halted because an overload of data knocked out communications and air traffic control radar. The incident exposed the fragility of the American aviation infrastructure, considered strategic for the country.
Flights were cleared to resume at 8:15 p.m. (10:15 p.m. Brasília time). Now airlines must reorganize the network, and delays and cancellations are expected to continue in a cascading effect as they reposition aircraft and crews.
There is no forecast yet for when air traffic will normalize.
“Our switches and routers became overloaded with data and went down,” said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at a press conference. “Actually, it’s not that they went down. They began sending inconsistent data, and that’s why we shut the system.”
It is only the third time in history that the United States has suspended all flights nationwide. The paralysis comes at a time when the FAA is dealing with outdated air traffic control equipment and is increasingly pressed to modernize them. In the beginning, the agency determined that no aircraft would take off until further notice, citing extraordinary circumstances and safety concerns.
“It will take a while to put in order what happened this afternoon,” Duffy said. Then he added: “I think we’ll be operating normally when the Thanksgiving travel peak comes.”
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters that the FAA was “making corrections to the system.” According to him, the “new technology” was “overloading the old system.”
Earlier, Duffy said the communications failure affected all regional control centers, which handle aircraft in cruise. The FAA attributed the problem to a temporary telecommunications outage, but the exact cause is still under investigation.
“We had more than 3,500 aircraft in the air,” Duffy said. “All were vectored and, the last time I checked, there were fewer than 400 in the airspace, all landing safely. We followed the standard procedures we use in this type of situation.”
According to the secretary, the controllers operated with “intermittent communications and radar,” which was enough to bring the planes safely to the ground.
Duffy said the Trump administration is asking Congress for US$50 billion in emergency funding to modernize the country’s air traffic control system.
“You can’t build anything without money,” he said.
A knowledgeable source said the FBI, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, ruled out that the outage was caused by a hacker attack or criminal action. Also according to this source, investigators are examining whether a software update could have triggered the blackout.
The two previous nationwide paralisms occurred in 2023, due to a fault in the FAA system that sends safety alerts to pilots and dispatchers, and in 2001, after the September 11 attacks.
The blackout occurs as the FAA pursues a broad modernization program for air traffic control, with US$12.5 billion already approved by Congress. Duffy has already requested another US$30 billion for the project, and the Department of Transportation reinforced the request this week.
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