Washington/The Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States, Markwayne Mullin, assured this Friday that the order to suspend takeoffs at airports throughout the country does not respond to any terrorist attack and that it is due to “an interruption in telecommunications.”
“There is no reason for the public to feel afraid or worry about their loved ones; this is not another 9/11 (in reference to the 2001 attacks on the United States),” Wayne explained to media gathered at the White House.
“People start from that assumption because it was the last time we had a nationwide flight stoppage. This is an interruption in telecommunications; it is something very different,” he declared.
The suspension this Friday has caused more than 10,000 delays and some 1,700 canceled flights throughout the country, according to specialized tracking websites.
“People start from that assumption because it was the last time we had a nationwide flight stoppage”
At 6:30 p.m. East Coast time, about two and a half hours after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that takeoffs were halted nationwide indefinitely, the Flightaware website indicated that more than 10,500 are suffering delays in the United States.
The most affected airports are Chicago (436 cancellations), Dallas-Fort Worth (417), Denver (392), Atlanta (384) and Charlotte (374).
In turn, FlightRadar24 indicated in a message in X that flight cancellations “already exceed 1,700 and continue to increase rapidly” and that the city of Chicago also leads with 229 suspended flights.
They are followed by two from New York, LaGuardia (205 cancellations) and JFK (189), in addition to Atlanta (153) and San Francisco (108).
Different local media and tracking websites have also confirmed that, after the suspension, flights that were not scheduled to fly over the United States continental territory have been allowed to take off, such as, for example, planes that departed from the East Coast bound for the other side of the Atlantic, or those that flew to Hawaii or Asia from airports on the West Coast.
Flights that were not scheduled to fly over continental US territory have been allowed to take off
Although there are no official figures yet, it is believed that this suspension of takeoffs may affect hundreds of thousands of passengers throughout the United States.
The FAA ordered on Friday afternoon to stop outbound air traffic at all airports in the country due to a communication problem that affects control centers, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
The FAA explained through a notification from the Air Traffic Control System Command Center that due to “extraordinary circumstances and for safety reasons” the suspension of takeoffs at US airports is decreed.
Duffy previously explained in a message on X that the suspension responds to “a communication problem that affects all air traffic control centers en route” and that FAA technicians are investigating the incident.
The US air traffic control system has problems with obsolete infrastructure that, according to Duffy himself, make its technological modernization urgent.
The suspension of air operations caused significant disruptions at Canadian airports
This Friday is the third general suspension of takeoffs in the United States so far this century, the first was after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the second was recorded in January 2023 due to a failure in the pilot warning system.
In turn, the suspension of air operations in the United States this Friday caused significant alterations in Canadian airports, with at least 89 flights canceled and another 170 delayed in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
According to data from the air tracking platform FlightAware, consulted around 5:30 p.m. local time, Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, the most important in Canada, registered 45 cancellations and 91 delays in its connections with the United States.
In Vancouver, cancellations amounted to 25 and delays to 40, while Montreal-Trudeau International Airport had 19 flights canceled and another 39 delayed.
These figures include incidents that are not necessarily related to the US ruling.
