A telecommunications outage knocked out the US Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control system for more than four hours on Friday, halting all domestic and international departures nationwide and disrupting travel for more than 1.5 million passengers.
The FAA lifted the ground stop at 8:15pm Eastern time Friday after the outage affected 22 regional air traffic control centres. FlightRadar24 counted more than 4,700 cancellations and 10,000 delays on Friday, with 700 flights already cancelled for Saturday.
The disruption stranded sports teams across multiple leagues. Five NBA teams were scheduled to fly Friday for Saturday games. The San Jose Sharks waited to fly to Utah, while the Florida Panthers reached St. Louis before the stoppage. The Texas Longhorns had boarded their plane when it was grounded. A team spokesman said, "We are grounded and waiting to see when we can leave." If the team had to take a bus to Baton Rouge for a Saturday 6:30pm kickoff, the journey would take about seven hours. Fourteen NHL games were set to play Saturday.
Todd Curtis, aviation safety expert and chief executive of AirSafe.com, said the failures were concentrated in the country's 21 air route traffic control centres in the lower 48 states and one in Alaska, which handle aircraft transiting between regions and rely on multiple handoffs between controllers.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said it would "take us some time" to restore capacity and that operations should return to normal before the Thanksgiving rush begins in less than two weeks. At Los Angeles airport, passenger Nicholas Erdodi, who travelled from New Zealand for a Chicago conference, said he spent six hours at the airport after being forced off his plane. "The challenge is you cannot ask anyone here what to do," he told Al Jazeera. "The lack of information is what bothers me."
Airlines including Delta, United, JetBlue, Air Canada and Aeromexico began resuming operations Friday evening and Saturday morning, warning that repositioning aircraft and crews would take additional time. At least 827 flights had been diverted by 7:05pm Friday. In Mexico City, about 70 flights scheduled for Friday at Benito Juarez airport could be affected.