FAA halts all US departures after air traffic control communication failure

The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a nationwide ground stop on all departing flights on Friday, November 13, citing extraordinary circumstances and safety. The Times of Israel reported that the agency's alert told airports to keep all departing traffic on the ground until further notice, without giving any further explanation at first.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy later attributed the halt to a communication problem affecting all of the country's Air Route Traffic Control Centers. In a post quoted by The Times of Israel, Duffy wrote that "FAA technicians are investigating the issue" and promised updates. According to Ynet, the FAA said the stoppage would last at least 7 hours, and aircraft already in the air would be permitted to land. Ynet added that flights to Israel were among those held up.

What the FAA and its control centers do

The FAA is the US federal agency that regulates civil aviation and runs the national air traffic control system. Air Route Traffic Control Centers are the regional facilities that guide aircraft between airports during the cruising portion of a flight, as opposed to the towers that handle takeoffs and landings. A fault affecting every one of these centers at once would leave controllers unable to manage traffic across the whole national airspace, which is the context for an order covering every airport in the country.

The nationwide order followed a more local one. N12, the Israeli television news outlet, reported on its news channel that shortly before the national announcement, the FAA had stopped air traffic in Chicago because of air traffic control communication problems. Haaretz, citing Reuters, likewise said the agency had earlier flagged serious communications issues in air traffic control. N12 also reported that international flights heading for the US would be handled case by case, and that airports were reporting the loss of radio frequencies.

How many flights were affected

The reported scale of the disruption differs between outlets. The Times of Israel, citing the flight-tracking service FlightAware, said nearly 7,000 US flights had been delayed or cancelled, a figure Ynet also carried. N12 correspondent Dean Fisher put the numbers higher, reporting more than 10,000 delayed flights and over 1,300 cancellations. The figures were published at different points in the evening and may reflect different counting methods; the reports do not explain the gap.

Fisher also described dozens of aircraft sitting on the ground in New York awaiting departure, with only arriving flights still circling in the airspace.

How rare is a nationwide ground stop

Israeli outlets agree that an order of this kind is highly unusual, but they do not agree on how many precedents exist. Ynet and the Telegram news channel Abu Ali Express both described it as only the second such order since the September 11 attacks. Fisher, writing for N12, said it was the third time in history that the FAA had issued a nationwide departure stop. Neither account named the earlier occasions.

Cyberattack ruled out, for now

Early reporting has pointed away from a deliberate attack. Ynet and N12 both relayed a CNN report that a preliminary inquiry found the failure was not caused by a cyberattack.

Aviation analyst Mary Schiavo, speaking to CNN, offered a possible technical explanation, The Times of Israel reported. She said the FAA had announced it was about to deploy a new artificial intelligence tool called SMART, short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, intended to help manage traffic across the national airspace. Schiavo noted that new computer systems have often struggled to work alongside older ones, and said her guess was that a similar mismatch lay behind the outage. She stressed this was a guess and said she had heard nothing indicating threats or terrorism. Officials have not linked the failure to SMART.

What the reports do not say

The FAA has not publicly identified the technical cause of the communications failure or confirmed whether it is related to any new system. Officials have not said when departures will resume beyond the 7-hour window, nor how many international flights, including those to and from Israel, have been diverted or cancelled. The CNN finding on a cyberattack is described as preliminary, and no official statement confirming it has been reported.