By Dan Catchpole
Nov 13 (Reuters) - The grounding of all departing flights across the United States on Friday was only the second such shutdown since the September 11, 2001, attacks. But the reason – communications equipment problems – has become increasingly common.
Last year, Congress approved $12.5 billion for upgrading the Federal Aviation Administration's antiquated air traffic control systems and hiring more controllers. The Trump administration wants Congress to approve another $30 billion to finish
the job.
Here are some of the biggest disruptions in the past three years:
November 13, 2026: Nationwide ground stop
The FAA grounded all departing flights in the United States after air traffic control centers suffered a communications outage. Airlines canceled more than 1,000 flights and delayed nearly 10,000, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.
September 21, 2026: East Coast
The FAA halted flights to airports in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington for eight hours, after the regional Philadelphia air traffic control facility's primary and backup data links failed. About 9,500 US flights were delayed or canceled as a result. The outage coincided with the arrival of 130 world leaders traveling to New York for the annual high-level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.
September 19, 2025: Dallas
A data service outage at the FAA's Dallas TRACON – or Terminal Radar Approach Control, which manages aircraft between the airport and high-altitude flight, forced the agency to issue ground stops at two Dallas-area airports. More than 1,800 flights were delayed and hundreds were canceled.
The FAA later said contractor L3Harris failed to make sure that redundancies were in place. In response, L3Harris told NBC 5 in Dallas that the “outages at (Dallas) were preventable and are a direct result of lack of U.S. government investment to replace legacy, end-of-life analog telecom circuits.”
One day earlier, an unrelated automation failure in Denver forced the FAA to slow flights into Denver International Airport, causing delays averaging 30 to 45 minutes.
April-May, 2025: Newark, NJ and Philadelphia
Multiple telecommunications outages over several weeks at the FAA's Philadelphia TRACON repeatedly disrupted traffic at Newark, New Jersey. A 90-second outage early in the morning of May 9 caused 380 flight delays and 141 cancellations, according to FlightAware.
During the outage, an air traffic controller told a freighter pilot that "our (radar) scopes just went black again. If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure for them to fix this stuff."
January 11, 2023: Nationwide ground stop
The FAA issued the first nationwide ground stop since the September 11 attacks, after contractors accidentally deleted files, which disrupted the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) messaging system.
More than 10,000 flights were delayed or disrupted due to the 90-minute ground stop.
(Reporting by Dan Catchpole in Seattle; editing by Peter Henderson and Stephen Coates)
