Flights across US resume after communications failure grounds planes

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A US halt to airplane takeoffs that grounded thousands of flights has been cancelled, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Friday evening (local time).

A US halt to airplane takeoffs that grounded thousands of flights has been cancelled, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Friday evening (local time).

The US grounded all departing flights nationwide earlier in the day after a communications failure hit air traffic control centres, in only the second such shutdown since the 11 September 2001 attacks.

Nearly 7000 flights were delayed or cancelled, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. Planes already in the air were allowed to land, but those on the ground could not take off.

Air New Zealand delayed all four of its flights to the US on Saturday by two hours as it assessed the situation.

"We don't have any flights scheduled to depart New Zealand for the USA until this evening, and there is currently no impact to these services," a spokesperson said earlier on Saturday.

The airline was contacting affected customers directly and would share updates on the travel alert section of the Air New Zealand website and the Air NZ app.

The FAA announced the nationwide ground stop at 3.54pm ET (2054 GMT, 9.54am NZ time). Shortly before the announcement, the FAA halted traffic in Chicago due to air traffic control communications issues.

The only other nationwide ground stop since the 11 September attacks came in January 2023, when the FAA halted domestic departures for less than two hours.

The outage comes amid heightened concern about aviation security worldwide after a wave of hoax bomb threats this month disrupted dozens of passenger flights across Europe, forcing unscheduled landings and prompting fighter jets to escort or intercept aircraft.

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