Make California Post a Preferred Source Travelers at Southland airports were being advised to expect continued delays and check with their airlines today after Friday’s roughly four-hour nationwide ground stop for all air traffic.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s order was lifted Friday at about 5:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, but widespread delays and cancellations were expected to continue affecting travelers until late Sunday.
Los Angeles International Airport, John Wayne Airport, Hollywood/Burbank Airport and Long Beach Airport were all advising travelers to reach out to the individual airlines for information about specific flights.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Friday night at the White House that aging air traffic control equipment and data-overloaded routers triggered the disruption.
“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said at a news conference. “Our routers actually got overloaded with data.”
Duffy said the routers began providing inconsistent data, prompting the FAA to shut down the system as a safety precaution. He said some routers had been replaced, but older hardware failed.
On Saturday, Duffy elaborated on the cause of the problem.
“In at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire, and they were bringing it over to fiber,” the secretary said. “Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. So specifically, we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, and what that did was gave us issues with our communication with airplanes, and it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds.”
Administration officials continued to insist that there was no indication the technical problems were the work of a cyber attack.
“We see zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related. So we want to be clear that we have an equipment issue, and we’re working through what this defective piece of equipment was,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said at a news conference Saturday.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also said the disruption was a telecommunications outage and not a national security threat.
“There is no reason for the public to be afraid or scared for their loved ones,” Mullin said Friday afternoon.
The outage occurred one day after the FAA announced an expansion of an artificial intelligence-based flight-management system known as SMART, or Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories. The system, initially used in the Washington, D.C., area, was being expanded to all 22 air traffic control centers to reduce delays, cut fuel consumption and improve the travel experience, according to the FAA.
It was not immediately clear whether the SMART expansion was connected to Friday’s communications problem. Mullin said an investigation would determine whether the system played any role.
Air Space Intelligence, the company that developed and operates the SMART system, said in a post on X that the ground stop was not connected to its technology.
“The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, or any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC,” the company said.
The FAA issued the nationwide ground stop shortly after 1 p.m. Friday because of a communications issue affecting all 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers, including the center in Palmdale.
The order required all departing aircraft to remain on the ground while technicians investigated the problem. Flights already in the air continued to land, while inbound international flights were to be handled on a case-by-case basis.
LAX officials advised passengers on X that the order was affecting departing flights.
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After the resumption of flights, John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana extended its nightly curfew from 10 p.m. to midnight to help get more planes into the air, according to Orange County Board Vice Chair Katrina Foley.
“Due to the emergency grounding today they’re going to extend the curfew,” Foley said. “People are stuck at the airport and other people want to come home so we need to accommodate the situation. This was all unexpected.”
FlightAware, a flight-tracking website, reported more than 9,500 flight delays and about 5,300 cancellations nationwide by Friday evening. At LAX, more than 600 flights were delayed and 293 were canceled within a 24-hour period, according to FlightAware.
As of Saturday morning, the website was reporting over 14,000 delayed flights and nearly 500 canceled flights nationwide. That included 202 delays and 162 cancellations at LAX, 24 delays and 43 cancellations at John Wayne Airport, 22 delays and 14 cancellations at Hollywood/Burbank Airport, and 17 delays and nine cancellations at Long Beach Airport.
The disruption marked only the second nationwide FAA ground stop since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The last one occurred in 2023, when a pilot notification system failed.
