Has the FAA Nationwide Ground Stop Been Lifted?
No. As of Friday evening, November 13, the FAA has not lifted the nationwide ground stop. Its Air Traffic Control System Command Center said at 5:46 p.m. Eastern, in Advisory 120, that the stop remains in effect, and that flights will be allowed to depart only as the en route control centers recover, in coordination with the Command Center. That is a phased recovery, not a lifting. The agency's next update is due at 11 p.m. Eastern. By 6 p.m., more than 10,000 flights had been delayed and 2,500 canceled in the United States, according to FlightAware figures reported by NPR.
The plain reality is that a ground stop ends only when the FAA says it ends. The record of this one is an order issued at 3:54 p.m. Eastern "until further notice," after a telecommunications outage hit all 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the facilities that guide planes between airports. A time printed on an advisory window is not a resumption time, and reality on the airport boards Friday evening — row after row of delayed flights — showed a system still stopped, not a system back to normal.
What the officials in the story claim is careful and narrow. The FAA says departures will be allowed as facilities recover, which means some flights may move while the stop itself stays in force. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the stop followed a communication issue affecting all the centers and that technicians are investigating. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the outage has not been linked to a threat or attack, and that two areas inside the United States are still able to communicate just fine.
"There is no indication, and we had no reason to believe as of right now that this was a threat to the United States. There's no reason for the public to be afraid or scared for your loved ones."
The common-sense principle is plain: a stop is lifted when the thing that caused it is fixed, not when the clock reaches the end of an advisory window. Until the FAA can talk to every plane at every handoff across the country, sending departures up on a schedule would be guessing with people's lives.
The consequence follows whether the stop lifts tonight or not. About 11,000 flights were scheduled to leave U.S. airports after 4 p.m. on Friday, CNBC reported, and every hour on the ground puts planes and crews in the wrong cities for Saturday. Cancellations will run into the weekend long after the last advisory expires. And it leaves the question that follows from it: if one telecommunications failure can hold every departure in America for an entire evening, how much of the system has to be rebuilt before a Friday like this cannot happen again — the very modernisation the FAA and the White House asked Congress to fund with another $30.1 billion on Friday morning.
The details that matter are these. Planes already in the air when the order came were allowed to land, and inbound international flights are being handled case by case. The last nationwide stop of this scale was in 2023, when the FAA's NOTAM alert system failed. This stop is a departure order, not an order for airborne planes to land, and no official has given a confirmed technical cause for the outage or a time when normal departures will resume. Travellers should check their flight with their airline, not the advisory window.
The FAA's own words on Friday remain the last confirmed word on the stop: "There has been a temporary telecommunications outage — out of an abundance of caution all flights have been halted. Every flight has been accounted for."