Thousands of travelers in the United States faced uncertainty after a massive aviation outage, spending the night on airport floors or stuck in painfully long lines on the morning of Saturday, November 14. More than 15,000 flights in the United States were delayed or canceled on Friday, and about 3,000 are expected to be delayed or canceled on Saturday. UNN reports, citing CNN.
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As of November 14, many flights across the country remained canceled following a system outage that led to the suspension of all aircraft flights in the United States.
Source: CNN
Flights resumed at 8:15 p.m. ET on November 13 (3:15 a.m. on November 14 Kyiv time). But travel chaos is expected to continue through the weekend as airlines struggle to cope with the huge number of displaced aircraft, passengers, baggage, and crews.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a ban on all flights to the United States on Friday afternoon, November 13. The ground stop order requires aircraft to remain on the ground and prohibits them from taking off. More than 3,500 aircraft were in the air when the order was issued. The order was lifted more than four hours later.
According to FlightAware, more than 15,000 flights in the United States were delayed or canceled on Friday, and about 3,000 are expected to be delayed or canceled on Saturday. Because so many aircraft were unable to fly, airports ran out of gates and runway space to accommodate planes. Some flights resumed, but huge crowds of people remain stranded at airports across the United States as officials warned that it would take time to clear the accumulated delays.
The rare decision to suspend all flights in the United States was made after "incredibly old" air traffic control routers became overloaded with data and began producing conflicting readings, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said. U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had introduced new technologies into the existing system, overloading the old system.
Administration officials said that more incidents like this would occur until the system was modernized. According to the source, U.S. President Donald Trump had pressed Congress to pass legislation to modernize control towers, terminals, and other critical infrastructure. Mullin called for a "complete overhaul" of the FAA's technological systems, which, he said, could cost approximately $50 billion.