FAA Lifts Nationwide Ground Stop After Hours-Long Outage; Officials Blame Aging Equipment, Not Cyberattack

At 8:15 on Friday evening, Eastern Time, the Federal Aviation Administration opened American airspace again. The nationwide ground stop on departures, imposed just before 4pm, had lasted more than four hours, and it left airports in disarray that officials say will take days to undo.

At least 600 flights were diverted while the stop was in force, to airports including Ronald Reagan Washington National, Chicago O'Hare, Denver International and Dallas Fort Worth International. Reagan Washington later stopped accepting diverted aircraft. Even as the stop was easing, Hawaii's transportation department said all west coast flights to the islands had been halted again because of debris from a SpaceX launch, less than an hour after it had announced they would resume. No casualties were reported.

The cause was a communications outage that paralyzed the air-traffic control system. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin briefed reporters at the White House once it was over, and neither gave a coherent account of what went wrong. Both appeared to suggest that new technology had been added to an antiquated system, and that older routers were overloaded with data and failed. Duffy described analog telecom switches and routers that began giving inconsistent data, which led the FAA to shut the system down. The agency had announced three days earlier that a new air traffic management tool called Smart had been activated at all 22 of the country's air route traffic control centers. Duffy denied that Smart, which incorporates artificial intelligence, caused the problem.

Mullin put it in terms of patching. As Duffy and the FAA put in new equipment, he said, it overwhelmed the older system. He said a patchwork does not work and the country needs one complete system built by someone coming in to do the whole job. On cyber-attack, he was direct: officials had seen zero evidence of one. In his telling, someone usually claims responsibility, there was no chatter, and no footprints or identified intruders, so it appeared to be mechanically driven.

President Trump had been out of sight for the crisis. Peter Doocy of Fox News said Trump told him by phone that it did not look like a cyber-attack because nobody was taking credit, and that it seemed to be a bunch of old broken stuff in the infrastructure the FAA relies on. Fox host Laura Ingraham, normally friendly to Trump and a former colleague of Duffy, pressed on the lack of public information. With more than 400 flights still airborne, she said, Americans wanted answers soon, because the situation was not only an inconvenience but frightening.

The briefing itself was heavy on praise for the president. Mullin opened by saying this was what Trump's leadership looks like, and Duffy credited Trump's new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, with pulling together the White House's intelligence assets. When a reporter asked why Trump had been silent throughout, Mullin answered with more praise and ended the session.

Duffy used the moment to make a funding case. He said the president has asked Congress for a year to fully fund a new air traffic control system, and he asked for $50bn in emergency funding.

Democrats on the House homeland security committee answered Mullin's remarks, which seemed to blame FAA patches, with a warning: they said the administration had brought the nation's skies to a standstill, that they would not let it bury how this happened, and that it should preserve all documents and emails because oversight was coming.

So the system is running, but the explanation is incomplete. Watch for whether the FAA's account of the overload holds up, what the promised oversight turns up, and whether Congress takes up the $50bn request.