Flights from all airports in US have been suspended: system failure has been detected in air traffic control centres
On 13 November, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suspended flights from all airports across the country due to communication problems in the air traffic control system. The decision was taken "due to exceptional circumstances and for safety reasons".
This was reported by the FAA, according to Reuters and Axios, as reported by Censor.NET.
What the restrictions mean
Aircraft already in the air may land, but no aircraft on the ground may take off "until further notice". The arrival of international flights will be coordinated on a case-by-case basis.
Reason for the suspension
The FAA explained that the suspension of departures was announced due to communication problems affecting several air traffic control centres along the routes. The agency’s technical specialists are investigating the causes of the disruption.
"All aircraft over the US must land immediately. No one knows what happened to the communications and equipment at that moment," the FAA stated.
Shortly before the nationwide ban, the FAA had suspended air traffic in Chicago for the same reason.
Background
- According to Reuters, this is the second time all flights across the US have been completely halted since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The previous incident occurred in January 2023, when the agency suspended all domestic flights for less than two hours.
- It should be noted that on 12 November, a global outage occurred at Microsoft. As a result, millions of users were unable to access Outlook email, chats and video conferences on Teams. The outage lasted for over 21 hours. The problems affected companies, government agencies and emergency services in various countries around the world.
