SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
The U.S. air travel system is slowly getting back off the ground. The Federal Aviation Administration has lifted the rare nationwide ground stop it issued earlier today, citing telecommunications failure. That grounded thousands of planes at airports across the country, stranding millions of passengers. NPR's transportation correspondent Joel Rose is here. We've been talking all afternoon and evening trying to sort this out. Joel, now we have a little bit of a resolution, but not really. What's the latest?
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Yeah. We just heard from the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, that, as you said, the airspace has reopened. The ground stop is lifted. But it's going to take some time to get this hourslong - to get through the backlog of canceled and delayed flights. And it's going to take even longer to figure out, apparently, what happened here.
During the news conference, Duffy said that investigators are still trying to understand exactly what the problem was. Duffy blamed the - Duffy cited intermittent communications, intermittent radar and blamed this on outdated air traffic control equipment that was overloaded with data. We have old switches, old routers, he said. It's an old system that went down. It got overloaded. Here's more of what Duffy said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: We're getting very little information. Our pilot's been great and has been giving us updates every 15 minutes, which has been really helpful and reassuring.
DETROW: I think we had the wrong tape there, Joel. But...
ROSE: That's the wrong cut. Well, you got...
DETROW: Yeah, yeah, keep going.
ROSE: I'll tell you more about Secretary Duffy.
DETROW: Sure.
ROSE: So he spent a lot of this press conference blaming old gear that failed. But when reporters pushed and asked for clarity on exactly what went wrong today, he wasn't able to give them a whole lot of specifics. He pivoted again and again to pushing for more money to rebuild the nation's air traffic control system, which has been a big priority for this administration but was - we just don't - we still have only Duffy's word that this was the old gear that failed. We don't have a lot of detail on what it was.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was at this press conference too. He said, there's no indication that this was a cyber attack, but he could not rule that out entirely - also started the press conference by saying that this outage is not related to the Microsoft outage that knocked out Outlook and some other services yesterday.
DETROW: Yeah, I feel like I had a lot of questions watching that briefing, as did many other people. And meanwhile, there's people all over the country trying to get home. Our reporter at Washington National Airport, Ava Berger, says she is hearing announcements that the hold's has been lifted, but the announcements are saying - urging people to please be patient. About half the board there is red with canceled flights. But she said people are now starting to optimistically slowly go back to their gates to see if their plane's ever going to leave. I mean, Joel, what is the situation like on the ground at other airports around the country?
ROSE: This is a mess, and it's going to be a mess for days. I mean, we've canceled - airlines have canceled thousands of flights. Thousands more are delayed. Planes are out of position. Crews are out of position. This is, you know, imagine if you had a giant blizzard at every airport in the country all at once.
DETROW: Ooh.
ROSE: You know, it's like the whole system is scrambled, and it's going to take days, optimistically...
DETROW: Yeah.
ROSE: ...Before we are back to normal in the U.S. aviation system.
DETROW: We've got about 10 seconds left. Remind us how rare something like this is.
ROSE: Very unusual. This is the second nationwide groundstop since September 11. The most recent was in 2023, and that one only lasted less than 2 hours. So this now appears to be the longest nationwide groundstop since September 11 of 2001.
DETROW: NPR's Joel Rose, thanks so much.
ROSE: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
