US flights were slowly resuming departures and a ground stop was lifted after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) scrambled to fix a system outage overnight that had forced a halt to all US departing flights.
More than 6,000 flights were delayed and nearly 1,000 cancelled according to the FlightAware website as officials said it will take hours to recover from the halt. The numbers were still rising.
The cause of the problem with a pilot-alerting system, which delayed thousands of flights in the United States, was unclear, but US officials said they had so far found no evidence of a cyberattack.
The outage occurred at a typically slow time after the holiday travel season, but demand remains strong as travel continues to recover to near pre-pandemic levels.
“Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the US following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted. We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem,” the FAA Tweeted.
The number of flights impacted rose even after the ground stop was cancelled. One issue airlines are facing is trying to get planes in and out of crowded gates, which is causing further delays.
At an airport in Greenville, South Carolina, Justin Kennedy abandoned a work trip to nearby Charlotte. He said confusion reigned as airline employees weren’t aware what the FAA was saying, and many passengers were initially unaware of the delays.
“I sat in a Chick-fil-A dining area that had a good view of the TSA exit,” the 30-year-old information technology employee said. “I saw at least four people sprinting to gates because they thought they were going to miss their flight, only to come back to the food court, out of breath.”
Captain Chris Torres, vice president of the Allied Pilots Association, said the outage could impact traffic through Friday.
“This thing was lifted at 9am Eastern. That doesn’t mean the problem stops at 9am. This is going to cause ripple effects,” said Torres, whose members fly for American Airlines. “The end result of this is going to be very similar to big weather events.”
The FAA had earlier ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures after its pilot alerting system crashed and the agency had to perform a hard reset around 2am, officials said. Flights already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations.
US President Joe Biden ordered the Transportation Department to investigate and said the cause of the failure was unknown. Asked if a cyber-attack was behind the outage, Biden told reporters, “We don’t know.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg pledged a “process to determine root causes and recommend next steps.”
Shares of US carriers initially fell in yesterday’s premarket trading, but most rallied after the market opened to positive territory as flights resumed.
After dropping more the 19% last year — its third consecutive year of decline — the S&P 500 airlines index has gotten off to a strong start this year, up 15.5%, as travellers return to the skies.
Source: Civil Aviation Authority-Qatar