FAA ground stop halts departures at U.S. airports

The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered a nationwide ground stop at all U.S. airports. Departing flights are to stay on the ground until further notice, and the agency has not posted that the stop is lifted.

Advisory 111 is the order. The Air Traffic Control System Command Center notice is dated Friday and signed at 4:54 p.m. AST. It says that, due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety, all airports are ground stopped. All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice. Inbound international flights will be managed case by case. The event window runs from 4:53 p.m. AST Friday to 12:00 a.m. AST Saturday. The effective time on the notice runs to 12:30 a.m. AST Saturday.

The FAA called it a telecommunications outage. At 6:02 p.m. AST the agency posted that a temporary telecommunications outage had led it to halt all flights out of an abundance of caution. It said every flight had been accounted for and that international flights would be handled case by case. A post it shared from the transportation secretary said the stop followed a communication issue affecting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.

The stop was still the posted order at 8:10 p.m. AST. Advisory 111 was still on the command center display page at that check. The page that lists the most recent advisory showed no notice for today, which is not a cancellation. No later FAA post in the evening said departures had resumed.

Two earlier nationwide stops are on record. The last nationwide ground stop was Jan. 11, 2023, after a failure of the Notice to Air Missions system. The one before that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. Friday’s order is the third.