The FAA flight stoppage of Jan. 11, 2023, was the first time the agency grounded all U.S. flights since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
On Jan. 11, 2023, Fox News published the headline, “FAA orders all flights grounded for the first time since 9/11.”
Hours earlier, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had ordered that all U.S flights be grounded due to what was referred to a computer system outage.
It’s possible that some of our readers were curious if this FAA order truly was the first time that all U.S. flights had been grounded since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a day when terrorists hijacked four airplanes and killed nearly 3,000 Americans. Two of the airplanes crashed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, which both collapsed soon after. A third plane struck the Pentagon. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and was “the only one of the four hijacked aircraft that failed to reach the terrorists’ intended target that day,” thanks to the “unity, courage, and defiance in the face of adversity” that was shown by passengers and crew, according to NPS.gov.
As for the claim made by Fox News, we found data from authoritative sources that supported this rumor.
For example, The Washington Post quoted a former FAA official who could not recall another time since 9/11 when all flights had been grounded:
The nationwide flight stoppage imposed by the FAA on Wednesday was the first of its kind since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to Michael McCormick, a former agency official.
“This is unheard of, and then the action that the FAA had to take in grounding all the flights makes it even more significant,” said McCormick, now a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
The Associated Press (AP) also mentioned the historic nature of the FAA’s flight-grounding order:
Longtime aviation insiders could not recall an outage of such magnitude caused by a technology breakdown. Some compared it to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the terror attacks of September 2001.
“Periodically there have been local issues here or there, but this is pretty significant historically,” said Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines and now a consultant in Minneapolis.
Beyond these two reports, we were not yet able to find any other dates between 9/11 and January 2023 when any such grounding order had been given by the FAA on a nationwide scale.
We reached out to the FAA’s press office to ask about the rumor and will update this story if we receive an official response.
The Cause of the Outage
As for the outage in January 2023, the AP published that the White House said there were no initial signs of a cyberattack. U.S. President Joe Biden also told reporters that the U.S. Department of Transportation was investigating.
According to the AP, the cause of the outage looked to have been an “antiquated computer system”:
Whatever the cause, the outage revealed how dependent the world’s largest economy is on air travel, and how dependent air travel is on an antiquated computer system called the Notice to Air Missions System, or NOTAM.
Before commencing a flight, pilots are required to consult NOTAMs, which list potential adverse impacts on flights, from runway construction to the potential for icing. The system used to be telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for the information, but has moved online.
The NOTAM system broke down late Tuesday, leading to more than 1,000 flight cancellations and more than 6,000 delayed flights by 11 a.m. Wednesday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.
This story will be updated if we further information comes to light.
Sources:
Chapman, Michelle. “Air Travel across US Thrown into Chaos after Computer Outage.” The Associated Press, 11 Jan. 2023, https://apnews.com/article/flight-delays-us-faa-updates-5805d15f520de8eadf52abb7b170487f.
Duncan, Ian. “Nationwide Flight Stop Is First of Its Kind since 9/11, Former FAA Official Says.” The Washington Post, 11 Jan. 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01/11/faa-notam-outage-flights-us/#link-4MIXEW57T5AMJJV5DCAXNH6DFU.
FAA News. Twitter, https://twitter.com/faanews.
“FAA Orders All Flights Grounded for the First Time since 9/11 | Fox News Video.” Fox News, 11 Jan. 2023, https://www.foxnews.com/video/6318506567112.
“Flight 93 Story – Flight 93 National Memorial (U.S. National Park Service).” NPS.Gov, https://www.nps.gov/flni/learn/historyculture/flight93story.htm.