Zel

For anyone confused about what’s happening with flights in America right now... Basically every airport in the United States is frozen tonight, because at 3:54 p.m. Eastern on Friday the FAA’s command center put out an advisory titled “National Ground Stop,” ordering that departing flights stay on the ground until further notice “for reasons of safety,” and to understand how we got here you have to go back about 45 minutes earlier, when Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway suddenly got ground stops for what the FAA called an “equipment outage,” and air traffic control audio out of Chicago reportedly had controllers saying they were close to “ATC zero,” which is the term for when controllers literally cannot talk to or manage the planes, and Delta dispatch was apparently warning crews about frequency outages across the country, and then it spread, until Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted that the problem was hitting ALL of the Air Route Traffic Control Centers, which are the 22 big regional facilities that handle planes once they’re up above 18,000 feet cruising between cities, so the part of the system that talks to planes mid-flight basically went quiet, and the FAA’s official explanation right now is a “temporary telecommunications outage,” and they say every flight in the air has been accounted for, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says there’s no sign yet of anything “nefarious” but that they aren’t ruling anything out, and CNN reports law enforcement officials preliminarily say it wasn’t a cyberattack, but here’s the part that should bother everyone, this is only the THIRD nationwide ground stop in American history, the first was 9/11, and the second was January 2023, when one corrupted file took down the pilot alert system and it turned out the backup had the EXACT SAME bad file, and three years later we’re back here again with an aging system that Washington let rot through administration after administration while spending money on just about everything else, and yes, some people are already rushing to blame the FAA’s new AI congestion tool, but nobody has shown any connection, so maybe we wait for actual facts this time, and meanwhile the stop has reportedly been pushed out to 11:30 p.m. Eastern, FlightAware is showing thousands of delays, and travelers are stuck at gates on a Friday night with no idea when they’re leaving, so basically you have a Chicago glitch, 22 centers losing comms, a nationwide ground stop with no clear end, and a system everyone has been warning about for decades, which is roughly where American air travel is tonight.