From The San Francisco Standard · · 1m 30s
FAA ends nationwide ground stop
SFO travelers face slow recovery after FAA lifts U.S. flight ground stop.
In brief
SFO travelers face slow recovery after FAA lifts U.S. flight ground stop. The FAA ended a daylong U.S. flight ground stop Friday evening but warned recovery would be slow for SFO travelers. Originally reported by The San Francisco Standard.
FAA lifts nationwide ground stop
The FAA ended a daylong halt to U.S. departures Friday evening after several hours.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warns recovery will be slow
Duffy said the recovery would take time and better movement was expected tomorrow.
“It’s going to take us some time to unwind what happened this afternoon. Hopefully tomorrow we will see better movement.”
Duffy blames aging air traffic control system
Duffy blamed the outage on aging equipment, saying the system was analog and overloaded.
“What we have is a really old air traffic control system. It’s analog. Our switches got overloaded with data and started giving us inconsistency in data. … It was the old hardware that went down.”
SFO travelers face delays into weekend
SFO officials warned travelers to expect delays into the weekend after nearly 5,000 flights were canceled nationwide.
Air traffic control system malfunction
Controllers had intermittent communication and radar but not a total blackout.
“We did it out of an abundance of caution.”
Possible cyberattack linked to system upgrade
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the problem was caused by upgrade work overwhelming the old system.
“As they were going in putting patches into the system and putting new equipment and technology, it overwhelmed the old system.”
SFO travelers experience delays
Passengers at SFO heard announcements about the ground stop and faced delays into the weekend.
Travelers rebook flights for weekend
Some travelers rebooked flights for Saturday to avoid weekend delays.
“Hopefully this will be resolved by then.”
SFO domestic flights delayed
SFO domestic Terminal 3 travelers booked hotels and backup flights home to Texas for Saturday.
“If everyone is booking, they might fill up.”
FAA expanded SMART AI system days before
The FAA expanded an AI-driven route-planning tool called SMART to all 22 regional air traffic control centers days before the outage.
“Air space intelligence, the startup behind the software, said the ground stop is not based on or a result of the smart system.”
The one thing
The FAA ended a daylong U.S. flight ground stop Friday evening but warned recovery would be slow for SFO travelers.
