FAA lifts grounding of all US flights, including at Charlotte Douglas
Just before 9 a.m. Wednesday, the FAA lifted its grounding of flights all across the country, including at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, after a technical outage forced the agency to take that action.
“Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. following an overnight outage ...” the FAA said on Twitter at 8:50 a.m. The ground stop has been lifted.”
The FAA said it is still investigating the cause of the initial problem.
Passengers can still expect potential delays at Charlotte Douglas, and should check their flight status before heading to the airport.
The FAA issue involved problems with its “Notice to Air Missions System,” the agency said in a tweet, and ordered all domestic flights halted until 9 a.m. “to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.” That system issues essential notices to flight personnel.
At about 8:30 a.m., the FAA said flights were starting to resume at Newark and Atlanta airports.
The White House said there was no evidence that a cyber attack caused the outage, the Washington Post reported.
The FAA first tweeted about its outages shortly before 6:30 a.m. Flight tracking website FlightAware was showing nearly 3,600 delays nationwide at 8:15 a.m. and 491 cancellations.
More than 600 flight delays at CLT due to FAA outage
Charlotte Douglas experienced 609 flight delays and 130 cancellations, FlightAware showed at around 5 p.m.
The Charlotte airport is the second largest hub for American Airlines, the world’s largest airline. American accounts for about 90% of all flights from the airport.
The airline tweeted it was closely monitoring the situation and “working with the FAA to minimize customer disruption.”
In 2021, CLT saw more than 43 million passengers, and the airport said last week that 2022 totals are projected to be near its record-breaking year of 2019 with 50 million passengers. Airports Council International ranks CLT fifth worldwide in operations and sixth in passenger traffic.
In a statement, the airport said, “We advise passengers to check their flight status before coming to the airport.” CLT referred additional comment to the FAA.
Concord-Padgett Regional Airport in Concord was the other commercial airport in the Charlotte area impacted by the flight disruption.
This story was originally published January 11, 2023 at 7:33 AM.
