Americans are facing another day of travel turmoil after the worst aviation crisis since the September 11 attacks stranded more than 1.5 million passengers and forced thousands of flights to be canceled.
Officials in the Trump administration have warned that the disruption could happen again. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin described the breakdown as a “national emergency.”
The Federal Aviation Administration blamed “extraordinary circumstances for safety reasons,” citing communications problems at regional air traffic control centers.
The five-hour nationwide ground stop was lifted shortly before 8:30 p.m. ET on Friday, but its fallout will continue through the weekend as travelers sleep in terminals and abandon or overhaul their plans.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a Friday briefing that “old hardware that went down” triggered the stoppage, adding that restoring normal air traffic would be “slow.”
More than 2,600 flights within, into or out of the United States had already been canceled for Saturday, while over 450 others were delayed, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.
Duffy asked Congress to approve $50 billion in emergency funding, warning that the country’s “old legacy equipment” would “continue to fail” and trigger similar disruptions.
“We were able to review what went wrong, reboot the system and go,” Duffy said. “But you will have more of these.”
Americans endured the longest aviation stoppage since 9/11 on Friday after an exceptionally rare ground stop stranded roughly 1.5 million passengers
The Federal Aviation Administration said the nationwide flight suspension resulted from “extraordinary circumstances for safety reasons”
More than 2,500 flights scheduled for Saturday had been canceled, with over 400 additional delays reported
Duffy said President Donald Trump had requested the funding and described the push as bipartisan.
“I think the question for the American people is, do you want your Congress to fund this?” Duffy said.
According to Duffy, instability in radar communications at air traffic control centers began at 3:36 p.m.
More than 3,500 aircraft were airborne when the ground stop was imposed, he said.
When the stoppage was announced Friday, the FAA said all flights had been halted “out of an abundance of caution.”
“Every flight has been accounted for, and international flights will be handled on a case-by-case basis,” the FAA said.
Passengers across the country reacted with confusion and alarm, including travelers already aboard aircraft, after the highly unusual ground stop was announced.
Before allowing flights to resume, the FAA said on X that it had “thoroughly tested our systems to confirm they were stable and that operations remain reliable.”
FlightAware reported more than 8,600 cancellations and 7,200 delays across the United States on Friday.
Some domestic flights began leaving late Friday after the ground stop ended. However, airlines are expected to need several days to recover because so many aircraft and crews were displaced.
Officials said they expected the system to return to normal before the Thanksgiving holiday rush.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said “old hardware that went down” caused the stoppage and warned that restoring normal air traffic would be “slow”
The ground stop lasted about five hours, with more than 3,500 aircraft in the air when it was imposed Friday
The rare ground stop was followed by more than 8,600 cancellations and 7,200 delays in the United States on Friday, leaving passengers sleeping in airports including LaGuardia
The stoppage was the first since January 11, 2023, when a malfunction disabled a key FAA computer system, and only the second since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Mullin said there was no sign of a threat to the United States, describing the incident instead as a “communication outage.”
“This isn’t the same comparison to 9/11,” Mullin told reporters outside the White House on Friday. “That’s a road I won’t go down.”
He said the FAA was installing “new equipment, new technology” that was overwhelming the older system.
Democrats criticized President Trump for not personally addressing the FAA ground stop on Friday.
At about 5:52 p.m. ET, Trump posted on Truth Social about his goal of making “our entertainment industry great again,” describing work with lawmakers from both parties on the Motion Picture, Television and Entertainment Revitalization Act.
The President did not mention the ground stop, which had been announced roughly two hours earlier.
Trump later said the stoppage did not appear to be the result of a cyberattack and could instead have been caused by an aging system that “relies on some old broken stuff” he had tried to upgrade, according to FOX News correspondent Peter Doocy.
The Democratic members of the House Homeland Security Committee sharply criticized the administration’s response in a post on X.
“What the hell is going on?” the account wrote. “Trump and his cabinet are completely out of their depth.”
New Jersey Representative Nellie Pou, a Democrat who serves on the House Subcommittee on Aviation, urged the administration to “be prompt and forthright in providing answers.”
“I do not want to speculate the cause of this crisis right now, but this is a massive, almost unprecedented disaster impacting tens of millions of Americans,” she wrote on X.
The President received regular updates on the situation throughout Friday, the Daily Mail understands.
Friday’s ground stop was the first in the United States since January 2023, when a major FAA computer system malfunctioned
Officials said there was no indication that the stoppage was connected to the Microsoft outage that disrupted subscription services worldwide earlier in the week
The FAA said it grounded flights “out of an abundance of caution” as it announced the nationwide halt
Trump later urged Congress to quickly pass legislation modernizing air traffic control systems, airport towers, terminals and other aviation infrastructure during a nighttime phone call with Republican Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, CNN’s Kit Maher reported.
Schmitt serves on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. In September, he introduced a bill proposing $30 billion in federal funding to upgrade the nation’s aviation infrastructure.
The Trump administration rejected claims that the communications failures behind the nationwide ground stop were tied to the FAA’s new artificial intelligence-powered system, which is being introduced to help predict problems in the skies.
The FAA’s SMART system operates from a single location near Washington, D.C., where specialists examine flight schedules, weather forecasts and hundreds of other data streams.
That office sends recommendations to the FAA command center, which then relays them to controllers across the country for consideration.
Duffy said at Friday’s briefing that “there was no possible way SMART would have impacted what happened today.”
He said the system was “completely disconnected” from the systems responsible for managing US air traffic.
ASI, the company that designed SMART, said: “The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.”
The Trump administration denied that the communications failures were connected to the FAA’s new AI-powered system
Some Democrats criticized President Donald Trump for not publicly addressing the aviation stoppage
The FAA said international flights would be reviewed individually during the ground stop
Passengers waited with their luggage at New York’s LaGuardia Airport on Friday after flights were grounded
There was also no evidence linking the nationwide ground stop to this week’s global Microsoft outage, which left millions unable to access the company’s subscription services.
Microsoft said it had found no indication that the flight disruption was related to its service outage.
Several sports teams scheduled to compete over the weekend changed game times, rearranged flights or hired buses in response to the travel chaos.
In college football, Auburn traveled by bus to Mississippi State after the SEC moved Saturday’s kickoff to 4:15 p.m.
Purdue also planned to take buses from West Lafayette, Indiana, to its game at Iowa.
Other affected schools included Baylor, Washington, Kansas State, Minnesota and No. 19 Ole Miss, which said it would not fly to Oklahoma for its game against the Sooners until Saturday morning.