A brief ground stop affecting United Airlines flights across the nation has been lifted on Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said.
A ground stop is an order requiring that planes scheduled to fly to the affected airport remain on the ground at their airport of origin.
At around 1:30 p.m. EST, the FAA issued a notice saying that United asked for departures to be halted because of what was described as an “equipment outage.”
“We are experiencing a systemwide technology issue and are holding all aircraft at their departure airports,” United said in its own statement.
“Flights that are already airborne are continuing to their destination as planned. We’re currently investigating and will share more information as it becomes available,” the airline said.
About 40 minutes later, United said the “issue was resolved and the flights have resumed.”
“We’re working with impacted customers to help them reach their destinations as soon as possible,” the company added.
The more than 200 United flights that were already in the air during the outage did not appear to be affected.
United operates 4,500 daily flights to more than 300 destinations, most of which are within the United States.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg took to X, formerly called Twitter, to say that he was aware of the situation.
“Am aware of the nationwide ground stop at United Airlines due to IT issues,” Mr. Buttigieg wrote. “FAA is currently receiving more information about the cause and scope of the issue, and DOT will make sure UA meets its obligations to affected passengers.”
Mr. Buttigieg also directed those affected by Tuesday’s ground stops to his department’s website for more information.
“If you are impacted, flightrights.gov has information about customer service commitments enforced by our department when airline problems cause you to experience major delays or cancellations,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who was flying on a United plane as the news broke, said he would be looking into the tech issues that caused the outage.
Recent Major Air Travel Disruption
On Jan. 11, the FAA suffered an outage of its key pilot notification system and was forced to issue a ground stop that lasted almost three hours, canceling more than 1,300 flights nationwide and delaying 10,000 more.The FAA later blamed a mistake that occurred during a routine maintenance of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which is responsible for generating and sending key information to pilots and airline dispatchers before a flight can take off, including those detailing weather, runway closures or construction, and other hazards that could jeopardize flight safety.
The NOTAM system used to be telephone-based, with pilots having to call dedicated flight service stations for the information. but the system has moved online.
According to the agency’s preliminary review of the incident, a software engineer “unintentionally deleted files” when transferring data between databases, leading to the NOTAM system outage.
The bad data was introduced when the engineer was working “to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database,” the FAA said, noting that both the primary and backup systems had been fed the bad data.
The agency added that it “has so far found no evidence of a cyber-attack or malicious intent.”
“The FAA made the necessary repairs to the system and has taken steps to make the NOTAM system more resilient,” the FAA stated in the Jan. 19 report. “The agency is acting quickly to adopt any other lessons learned in our efforts to ensure the continuing robustness of the nation’s air traffic control system.”
