Hundreds of flights across the United States were suddenly grounded on Thursday evening after the airspace over multiple Midwestern states was abruptly closed, according to ABC News Live Prime. The broadcaster reported that the disruption was traced to a power outage at an air traffic control facility in Minneapolis. Officials described the shutdown as a major event that rippled well beyond a single airport and affected a wide region of the country's air network.
The facility at the centre of the outage is an Air Route Traffic Control Center, the kind of installation that manages radars and air traffic control frequencies for aircraft moving between airports rather than one that handles a single field. ABC News aviation contributor John Nance stressed that this was not an outage at an airport but at a control centre, calling it a very big deal. He explained that the Minneapolis centre, sometimes referred to as Minneapolis Center, sits at the heart of how planes are guided through the region's skies.
The scale of the affected zone helped explain why the closure had such wide-ranging effects. According to the network, the Minneapolis facility controls air traffic across a massive swath of the Midwest covering some 330,000 square miles. A FlightAware map tracking flights around the time of the shutdown showed the skies over that area almost empty, with hardly any aircraft moving through what is normally a busy stretch of airspace.
As the systems went down, a ground stop was issued for all departures at Minneapolis, holding planes on the ground before they could take off. The broadcaster reported that the ground stop applied to all departures out of Minneapolis at that time, with an updated status expected shortly after the top of the following hour. The measure was designed to keep new aircraft from entering an airspace that controllers could no longer fully manage.
The seriousness of the situation was audible in the tower communications at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport after all flights there were grounded. In the exchange aired by the network, a controller can be heard saying the centre was shut down, completely shut down, and that the facility appeared to be having frequency and or radar issues. At that point, according to the broadcast, there were zero updates on when the problem might be resolved.
By the time the outage was being reported on air, the Federal Aviation Administration said its systems were back up and running again. However, exactly what triggered the massive outage remained under investigation, with officials not yet offering a cause. The network noted that the events were still unfolding even as the FAA reported that the affected systems had been restored.
Even with the systems back online, the effects on air travel were far from over. ABC News reported that hundreds of delays were expected over the next several hours as airlines and controllers worked through the backlog built up while the airspace was closed. The disruption contributed to the hundreds of flights grounded across the country during the shutdown, leaving travelers facing knock-on delays well after the control centre came back up.