Update: Flights resume, but chaos at U.S., Canadian airports continues after FAA ground stop

The emergency order has been lifted, but the chaos and logjams remain at airports across North America Friday night.

A rare ground stop order issued by the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday afternoon halted all takeoffs from U.S. airports, leading to massive backlogs of flights and a cascade cancellations after a key communications platform used by air traffic controllers and pilots started cutting in and out of service.

The ground stop order was lifted at 8:15 p.m. ET, but by then, the bottleneck had built. At Vancouver International Airport, there were more than 150 delayed flights and 69 cancellations as of 7 p.m. PT, according to the flight traffic tracking website Flight Radar 24.

CNN reported the issue started in a network router at Chicago Midway International Airport before cascading across the United States.

CBS News reported than an update to a private communications network which handles radio frequencies air traffic controllers use to communicate with pilots caused the system to reboot, then crash. The system is operated by L3Harris, a defence contractor and technology company.

The communication disruption comes just days after the FAA expanded its use of artificial intelligence with the addition of a cloud-based management system. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the problem lay with the agency’s older, “outdated” systems.

“Welcome to Friday the 13th,” Duffy said as he began a media briefing at the White House Friday night.

“It’s an old system that went down, and went down everywhere. It got overloaded … our fix gives us a pretty good indication that it was a legacy network problem.”

A report from Bloomberg said the FAA had been dealing with outages across its network in recent years because of decades-old equipment, with the Department of Transportation spending US$12.5 billion from Congress to address the issues. Duffy asked for an additional $30 billion for that work earlier this week, and reiterated that request at Friday’s briefing.

“This is what happens when Congress kicks it down the road,” he said.

Air Canada told its passengers that flights to and from the Caribbean and South America may also be impacted by the ground stop, as well as any U.S.-related flights.

The carrier is also offering free rebooking for those customers whose flights were impacted at Calgary, Halifax, Montréal, Ottawa, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Toronto or Vancouver on Nov. 13 or 14.

The number of cancellations may climb as pilots and flight crews start to bump up against their duty time limitations. Pilots have a maximum amount of time they can be on duty — usually 9-14 hours — and that starts when they report for work, not when they take off. Flight attendants also face limitations over work hours, which generally run to 15 hours.