FAA Grounds Every Departing Flight in America After Air Traffic Control Radios Fail

The Federal Aviation Administration stopped every departing flight in the United States on Friday afternoon, grounding planes at airports from coast to coast after a communications failure cut contact between air traffic controllers and the aircraft they guide.

The order went out at 3:54 p.m. Eastern from the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Warrenton, Virginia. It told every airport in the country to hold all departing traffic "until further notice," citing "extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety." Planes already in the air were allowed to keep flying to their destinations. Flights heading into the United States from abroad are being handled one by one.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed the cause within the hour. In a post on X, he said a "communication issue" was "impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers" and that FAA technicians were investigating. An FAA spokesperson gave the same account, saying the agency would provide updates as it learned more.

The trouble started before the nationwide order. Reports put the first problems at around 3:30 p.m. Eastern at the FAA's Kansas City Air Traffic Control Center, and the disruption spread from there. Shortly before the national order, the FAA halted traffic in Chicago. Two FAA sources familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner the halt stemmed from a "rolling frequency outage" affecting the facilities that monitor planes in flight. Flight-tracking service Flightradar24 and Canadian air traffic control linked the disruption to an FAA radio outage.

At the time the order was issued, roughly 3,100 aircraft were in the air and bound for airports in the United States, according to flight-tracking data cited by The Weather Channel. Those planes can land. Nothing can take off until the FAA lifts the order, and the agency has given no firm time for that. The advisory lists an estimated end of 11 p.m. Eastern, but that is a placeholder — the order itself says "until further notice."

Ground stops of this scale are almost unheard of. The last time the FAA halted departures nationwide was in January 2023, when a system that distributes critical flight safety notices, known as NOTAM, failed. Before that, the only comparable shutdown came on September 11, 2001. Friday's order is the third of its kind in a quarter-century, and the first tied to a loss of controller communications.

The timing could hardly be worse for travelers. The stop landed on a Friday afternoon, at the start of a weekend, with planes and crews now out of position across the country. Even after departures restart, airlines will need hours — in some cases into the weekend — to untangle the backlog, reposition aircraft, and rebook passengers. Anyone holding a Friday evening ticket should expect cancellations and delays, and check with the airline before heading to the airport.

The FAA's own public status page, where the agency posts airport conditions, was working only intermittently on Friday afternoon, according to Gizmodo. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark airports, told the outlet it was referring all questions to the FAA.

What caused the communications failure is still unknown. The FAA has not said whether it was an equipment failure, a software problem, or something else, and officials have not ruled anything in or out. For now, the agency's message is short: technicians are investigating, and updates will follow.

Friday was a reminder of how much of that system depends on controllers being able to talk to pilots — and how quickly it stops when they can't.