Airport chaos continues after US ground stop lifted – as it happened
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US aviation agency lifts nationwide ground stop affecting all air travel
Chaos at US airports as flight stoppage grinds travel plans to a halt
We're wrapping up this live coverage of the US ground stop and travel chaos that followed - it's just passed 12.50am in Washington DC. Below's a rundown on what happened, and you can read a full report here. Thanks for being with us.
The Federal Aviation Administration declared a nationwide ground stop on Friday afternoon, throwing airports into sudden chaos, after a communications failure at air traffic control centres.
More than 6,600 flights were cancelled and 8,600 delayed, with another 1,500 already cancelled for Sunday, according to FlightRadar24. Aviation analysts said the four-hour nationwide grounding could disrupt airline schedules for days. It was the longest flight shutdown since the attacks of September 11 2001.
The FAA lifted the ground stop later on Friday, with transportation secretary Sean Duffy saying US airspace reopened at 8.15pm ET (0115 GMT). But departures would resume gradually and it would take time for airlines to restore normal operations, he warned. It's going to be slow."
All US-bound departures from European airports are suspended until 5am UTC on Saturday, according to a notice published by the European traffic control agency, Eurocontrol.
US airlines including American, United and Southwest began resuming flights on Friday night. Thank you for your understanding as we work as quickly as possible to fully restore normal operations," Delta said.
Duffy said the federal government had identified the problem" that brought down the US air traffic control system on Friday and it was operational right now". The system was incredibly old", he said. Our routers actually got overloaded with data, and ... they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down."
There was no indication from preliminary investigations that the communications stoppage was tied to a nefarious attack", homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin said.
Duffy blamed Congress for failing to fund a new air traffic control system that he said could prevent such outages, and called for $50bn to modernize it.
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