Nationwide FAA Ground Stop Reaches MacArthur as Airlines Rebuild Schedules Ahead of Thanksgiving

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a ground stop at every U.S. airport Friday afternoon after communications trouble hit several of its regional air traffic control centers, and airlines were still canceling thousands of flights Saturday as they moved planes and crews back into position.

The FAA command center issued the order at 3:54 p.m. Eastern time, citing "extraordinary circumstances" and "reasons of safety," and said inbound international flights would be handled case by case. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said radar and communications at the centers turned unstable at 3:36 p.m. and that the airspace reopened at 8:15 that night. At a White House briefing Friday night he blamed aging analog equipment. "Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data," he said. Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, said investigators had seen "zero evidence" of a cyberattack. On Saturday, Duffy tied the overload to a contractor's work replacing old copper lines with fiber.

Before Friday, the country had seen two nationwide stops in a quarter century: one following the 2001 terrorist attacks and one in January 2023, when an outage of the FAA's pilot notice system grounded domestic departures.

Some flying went on during the stop. Alaska Airlines said its service within Alaska and its Hawaii interisland flights kept operating, and that departures from the West Coast to Hawaii and international departures from Honolulu were allowed to continue.

FlightAware's tracker showed 9,178 canceled flights involving U.S. airports on Friday and 4,256 for Saturday as of 11:59 a.m. that day. Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator, said Saturday that the "worst is behind us" and that schedules should be fully back by late Sunday. Until then, he said, there would still be delays and cancellations.

At Islip's Long Island MacArthur Airport, a spokesperson said air traffic control alerted the airport shortly before the FAA's announcement and that three departures and three arrivals were running late at that point with none canceled. The airport also said its terminals had no operational problems but warned that a longer outage would raise the odds of cancellations over the following days. FlightAware's MacArthur page showed nine cancellations Friday and six Saturday at the same 11:59 a.m. reading, and flight-tracking boards listed canceled Saturday morning JetBlue and Southwest departures to Florida and Baltimore.

At LaGuardia on Friday, Janice Llewellyn, 61, told a reporter she feared missing her daughter's wedding in Toronto.

Duffy said Friday the system should be "back up and operational" for the Thanksgiving peak and offered a personal stake. "My kids are flying next Friday back from college," he said, a reference to Nov. 20.

In a holiday forecast released before the outage, American Airlines said it expects more than 8 million customers on nearly 85,000 flights from Nov. 19 through Dec. 1, with 7,021 flights scheduled for Sunday, Nov. 29, its busiest single day since the pandemic.