WASHINGTON: 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 U.S. departing flights.
More than 6,000 flights were delayed and nearly 1,000 canceled 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 U.S. officials said they had so far found no evidence of a cyberattack. –Agencies
The outage occurred at a typically slow time after the holiday travel season, but demand remains strong as travel con-tinues to recover to near pre-pandemic levels.
“Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. 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 canceled. 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 confu-sion reigned as airline employees weren’t aware what the FAA was saying, and many passengers were initially una-ware 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 em-ployee 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.”
