Homeland Security secretary says there’s no sign of wrongdoing behind FAA nationwide communications grounding

The Story

Homeland Security Secretary said there is no indication yet of a nefarious act behind an FAA communications problem that led to a nationwide grounding of flights Friday afternoon.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights nationwide because of communications problems at regional air traffic control centres. An FAA notice said the ground stop was being imposed “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the issue involves communications affecting the 22 regional air traffic control centres that direct planes en route between airports nationwide, and that FAA technicians are investigating.

Duffy said the grounding was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system malfunctioned. He said the last prior nationwide ground stop occurred after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

The government has been working to overhaul air traffic technology relied on by air traffic controllers, including replacing old copper wires with fibre optic lines and gradually replacing outdated radio systems at airports after Congress approved $12.5 billion for the project last year, though Duffy said more work remains.

Duffy has said another $30 billion will be needed to complete the work, and the White House has begun lobbying Congress to approve it.

Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot, said the problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast, but that this time the scale was nationwide.

Arroyo said communications capability is critical to flight safety, adding that if controllers cannot communicate—whether because wiring is run down or for other reasons—airplanes must be stopped on the ground.

He also said Friday’s ground stop differed from the post–Sept. 11 response because planes were not being told to land immediately, and pilots likely were able to communicate with ground controllers at airports.