US Flights Resume After Nationwide Ground Stop Over Communications Outage Strands Travellers

At San Francisco Airport, Auckland traveller Leigh Robertson was waiting to board a Delta flight to Los Angeles when her departure slipped back once, then twice, then a third time. More than three hours after the trouble began, the flight was cancelled. Nobody from the airport, she said, had told her anything. Her flight just kept rolling from one delay to the next.

The cause was a nationwide ground stop. The Federal Aviation Administration said it had halted flights at all US airports after a communication issue affecting every Air Route Traffic Control Centre, and that its technicians were investigating. In a later post on X, the agency called the problem a temporary telecommunications outage and said it had acted out of an abundance of caution. The order has since been lifted, and the New Zealand Herald described it as an extremely rare step.

AFP reported immediate confusion at airports. Departure boards at many of them showed flights operating normally while passengers were unable to board. FlightAware counted 25,482 cancellations and delays on the day. One Kiwi traveller told the Herald that Los Angeles International Airport was totally shut down when he arrived.

Robertson said passengers learned of developments in fragments. Over the loudspeaker, travellers heard that several flights to Canada had been cancelled. For anything else, holidaymakers had to rely on Google. She had never seen an airport so crowded, she said, with thousands of people sitting wherever they could find space. The mood, though, stayed pretty calm and quiet. There were no big demonstrations of frustration, only people who got up and groaned a little. Her main worry was whether airlines could find hotel rooms for everyone overnight, and she said many people could be in for a long night. She also described the bind facing travellers: cancel a flight and try the train or a rental car, or keep waiting without knowing what would happen. She called her own situation very first-world problems, and said others would be hit far harder.

US officials moved to head off alarm. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters there was currently no reason to suspect a national security threat behind the outage. He said there was no reason for the public to be afraid or scared for their loved ones, and that this was not another 9/11. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the recovery would take time. It would take a while to unwind what happened that afternoon, he said, and flight movement depended on resources. He expected a ripple effect and said officials were looking at this weekend's flights to get things back on track.

In New Zealand, House of Travel chief executive David Coombes told travellers to expect delays over the coming days while airlines worked to restore normal schedules. Air New Zealand's chief operations officer, Kate Boyer, said the airline was closely monitoring the situation. It had no flights leaving New Zealand for the US until that evening, so those services were not affected. Flights from the US to New Zealand had been proactively delayed by two hours as a precaution while the airline assessed matters. Boyer said Air New Zealand would contact customers directly if their flights were affected, and she pointed travellers to the travel alert section of the airline's website and its app.

The ground stop is over, but the backlog is not. The weekend is the next test, as airlines and the FAA work through displaced aircraft, crews and passengers.