Every Flight Is Grounded on Day Trump Admin Installed AI Controls

The FAA imposed a nationwide ground stop on November 13, citing extraordinary safety circumstances and a communications problem affecting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers. Starting at 3:54 p.m. Eastern, flights already in the air could land, but departures were halted until the order’s scheduled end at 11 p.m.; incoming international flights were handled individually. More than 1,000 aircraft were airborne when the stop began, while over 30,000 arrivals and departures remained scheduled and more than 1.5 million people were booked on later departing flights. The disruption followed an earlier halt to traffic around Chicago. The headline links the crisis to the Trump administration’s rollout of AI-supported controls, but the cause was not established: a cloud-based FAA system called SMART was scheduled to launch that day, and experts suggested an upgrade mishap might have contributed.

Officials said there was no evidence of a cyberattack, though they did not rule one out. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin described a telecommunications outage, said people aboard planes were safe, and emphasized that restoring communications came first; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also identified communications issues across the control centers. The shutdown was only the second nationwide ground stop since September 11, 2001; the other occurred in 2023 after a system outage paused domestic departures for about 90 minutes. Duffy later asked Congress for $50 billion to address the problem, prompting former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene to call the request a “shakedown.” The disruption landed less than two weeks before Thanksgiving, a peak travel period.