For four and a half hours, the sky above the United States emptied out.
Normally, throughout the day and the night, thousands of planes are taking off, crisscrossing the country, and landing. When the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all U.S. flights around 4:00 p.m. today, because of “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety,” some 4,000 airplanes were in the sky, headed for U.S. airports, according to Flightradar24, an aviation-tracking website. Even if no more flights took off, all of those planes needed to land.
For the people below, getting them down safely became an immediate preoccupation. This type of nationwide grounding had happened only twice before in recent history—once after the September 11 attacks, and once in January 2023 for about an hour and a half. Every aircraft still aloft needed to make it to its destination, despite apparently spotty communications.
Our formidable system of flight, a machine that’s constantly in motion and choreographed to the minute, has backups built in. Pilots have emergency systems they can rely on if they lose radio communications, as well as onboard systems to detect where other aircraft are around them, R. John Hansman, the director of the MIT International Center for Air Transportation, told me. Communications problems don’t generally mean an immediate safety risk, and planes can still fly toward their destinations, he said. “The problem is getting them safely down.”
“The risk is related to how many other airplanes you could bump into,” he said. “So if you stop putting new airplanes into the system, then it becomes safer and safer and safer, until there’s no airplanes in the air. But of course, nobody’s flying, right?”
At the moment that the ground stop was declared, planes would have been landing. They landed in the minutes afterward, and in the hours after that. Within three hours, the number of flights still in the air had dropped to 550, Ian Petchenik, a spokesperson for Flightradar24, told me. Wheels hit the ground; the people on the plane and the people tracking their flights exhaled; pilots offered reassurances from the cockpit. On a plane that landed in Austin, carrying a number of writers headed a book festival (including some of my Atlantic colleagues), the pilot explained the delay on the tarmac by telling passengers there had been a “little issue with the FAA, folks, so no one is taking off and so there are no gates free.”
In the first hours, the Trump administration offered little immediate reassurance, or clarification of what had gone wrong or how long it might take to fix. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said, “It’s just a telecommunication outage as of right now.” More than four hours after the outage began, Mullin told reporters at the White House that “we have seen zero evidence that this was a cyberattack” but also did not rule it out or explain a cause for the outage. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who was on an airplane from Dallas amid the ground stop, said at the press conference that the country’s air traffic controllers faced “instability” in communications and radar—that switches and routers “actually got overwhelmed with data.” He blamed old analog equipment and software, and demanded $50 billion from Congress to fix the system. “It’s going to continue to fail,” he said.
Some of the problems, Duffy said, affected communications with the Air Route Traffic Control Centers, a network of 22 regional hubs. Airplanes communicate with these centers as they fly across the country. The disruption also affected what are known as Terminal Radar Approach Controls, facilities where air traffic controllers help guide planes approaching and departing airports. During this outage, air traffic controllers could apparently communicate on some radio frequencies but not others, and they had to actively search for ways to talk with the airplanes in the sky, Nick Daniels, the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN. “This is not just a bad day,” he said. The air traffic controllers were “handling something that’s never been seen before.”
As the hours dragged on and planes kept landing but not taking off, the airports got crowded. Thousands of flights across the country got canceled. Passengers waited for hours, trying to figure out new plans, and scrambled for rental cars. They went home, or back to their hotels. Good Samaritans on social media offered rides. At Ronald Reagan National Airport, just outside Washington, D.C., hundreds of grounded travelers waited around a baggage carousel that moved so rarely that people felt comfortable sitting directly on it. Dana Johannesson, an ultrasound specialist in black scrubs and gold hoops, had gotten on her plane then gotten off, before waiting for her bags for hours; while she had sat on the plane, the American Airlines app still attributed the delay to the weather, but the pilot got on the loudspeaker to say that a friend had told him to give up on flying into Tampa and book himself a rental, she said.
Then the ground stop lifted at 8:15 p.m. Thousands of planes that had been flying four hours earlier had landed. But fewer than 400 were still in the air. The passengers on those planes got on and off their plane as planned. The system started up again, and the planes could take off.
Hana Kiros contributed reporting.
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