How to Land 4,000 Planes During a Ground Stop
Hoobastank, The Used, Simple Plan and Lolo performed aboard a Southwest flight from Los Angeles to Orlando, Fla., on Nov.
Key points
- Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said, “It’s just a telecommunication outage as of right now.” More than four hours after the outage began, Mullin told reporters at the White House that “we have seen zero evidence that this was a cyberattack” but also did not rule it out or explain a cause for the outage.
- “So if you stop putting new airplanes into the system, then it becomes safer and safer and safer, until there’s no airplanes in the air.
- The air traffic controllers were “handling something that’s never been seen before.” As the hours dragged on and planes kept landing but not taking off, the airports got crowded.
Southwest Airlines brought back its “Live at 35” program during Friday’s nationwide grounding of air travel with performances from artists on their way to Vans Warped Tour.
Additional details
- But of course, nobody’s flying, right?” At the moment that the ground stop was declared, planes would have been landing.
- The disruption also affected what are known as Terminal Radar Approach Controls, facilities where air traffic controllers help guide planes approaching and departing airports.
- This type of nationwide grounding had happened only twice before in recent history—once after the September 11 attacks, and once in January 2023 for about an hour and a half.
- Wheels hit the ground; the people on the plane and the people tracking their flights exhaled; pilots offered reassurances from the cockpit.
- Within three hours, the number of flights still in the air had dropped to 550, Ian Petchenik, a spokesperson for Flightradar24, told me.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 2 articles from 2 outlets
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.