FAA lifts grounding order after 4 hours, flight delays and cancellations continue

The Friday-the-13th FAA order to ground all planes nationwide was lifted after four hours, but the damage done continues to cause delays and cancellations of flights as airlines try to make adjustments to schedules. The grounding order came at around 4 p.m. Eastern with no warning and little explanation. While Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin assured Americans that the order, only the second since 9/11, was not part of a threat to the nation, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy later explained that the telecommunications outages of the U.S. air traffic control system were caused by an overload of an old, analog system, which the FAA is in the process of replacing. “We systematically, but slowly, brought down 3,500-plus aircraft across the national airspace,” Duffy said during a White House briefing. Continued Duffy: “We’re going to try to move as many of those [delayed planes] as we can tonight.

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