US halts takeoffs from all airports for more than four hours

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday, 13 November, imposed a nationwide ban on aircraft departures from all of the country's airports, citing "emergency circumstances and safety considerations". The restrictions were lifted after more than four hours, but the disruption kept affecting airlines and airports across the country. It is only the second such case since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Deutsche Welle reports.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the cause was a communications system failure that affected all air traffic control centres. He said FAA technical specialists were working to establish what happened. Shortly before the nationwide ban, the FAA had halted air traffic around Chicago because air traffic controllers had communication problems, Reuters reported. The agency later said there had been a "temporary failure of telecommunications systems", after which all flights were stopped.

The FAA clarified that decisions on international flights would be made case by case. Aircraft already in the air were allowed to land. According to the flight-tracking service FlightAware, about 11,000 flights in the US were delayed or cancelled by evening.

The failure also affected international air travel. At the FAA's request, Eurocontrol, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, which has 42 member states including Israel, suspended the dispatch of flights to the US.

Cause unknown

US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters the consequences could not be resolved within an hour and that "it will take time". He added that the causes were currently unknown. "So far there are no signs that this was any malicious attack on us," he said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is also not linking the incident to a cyberattack or other criminal activity, Bloomberg reported, citing sources. One of the theories being examined is that the system stopped working after an update. A member of the US Congress, speaking anonymously to The New York Times, said the National Security Council at the White House and the Pentagon had said they did not yet know the cause.

Previous cases

The FAA previously imposed a nationwide ban on departures on 11 January 2023, after a failure of the pilot notification system; that time the restrictions lasted about an hour and a half. Before that, such a measure had been used only after the 11 September 2001 attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people.

Mullin specifically stressed that the current failure was unrelated to those events. He said many people were trying to draw such a parallel, but that it was not the case.