FAA ground stop halts flights at DFW and Dallas Love Field airports
There are ground stops at both Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field Airport after a nationwide ground stop was issued by the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday afternoon.
Our CBS News Texas chopper has been showing all the planes parked at the terminal or on the tarmac at DFW Airport, one of the busiest airports in the country.
Under the ground stop, if planes are in the air, which by CBS News' count is about 3,000 aircraft bound for U.S. airports as of 3:30 p.m.
The FAA says there were communication issues impacting a number of air route traffic control centers.
When the issue is fixed, getting all the flights back on track will take time. It is unknown when that could occur.
"By order of the Federal Aviation Command Center all airports are ground stopped. All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice. Inbound international flights will be managed on a case by case basis," the Air Traffic Control System Command Center said in its alert.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters in a briefing outside the White House that "there was no indication, as of yet, that this was a nefarious act against us. It was just a telecommunication outage, as of right now."
"There is no indication, we had no reason to believe, that as of right now, that this was a threat to the United States," Mullin said. "This was a telecommunication outage throughout FAA. Out of an abundance of caution, we have grounded all the flights. And all the flights are accounted for."
He said flights will be able to land safely.
This nationwide groundstop has only happened two other times. The first was on Sept. 11 in the wake of the terror attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. The second was in January of 2023 when there was a system failure in the FAA's Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system. That groundstop lasted nearly 12 hours.
