FAA ground stop and communication issue

The video opens with the FAA issuing a nationwide ground stop for all flights because of extraordinary circumstances and safety. Richard Quest reads the FAA wording: all aircraft operators and airports are ground stopped, and all departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice. Inbound international flights are to be managed case by case. Richard Quest says the FAA is basically shutting down all movements, takeoffs and landings, because of what it calls communication difficulties. According to information received by Pete Muntean, the problem is limited to communication of en route air route traffic. The video says planes can still communicate, but there are outages and problems with communications that direct aircraft along route networks across the country.

Boston Logan and inbound flights

The video shows Boston Logan Airport, where aircraft on taxiways that would have been preparing to depart are not departing because of the ground stop. Richard Quest says planes already in the air will have to land for fuel reasons and international traffic will be handled one by one. He mentions late afternoon flights from Europe, overnight flights from Asia, and flights coming up from the Caribbean. The video says people on aircraft that are taxied out will need to be disembarked, people arriving will need to be handled, and aircraft that land may not take off again for the foreseeable future. It says the FAA will not release ground traffic until it has a handle on en route air traffic corridors.

SMART rollout and Newark travellers

Mary Schiavo says the FAA had announced it was about to deploy a new artificial intelligence tool called SMART to assist in managing air traffic across the national airspace system. She says the tool is called strategic management of airspace routing systems and that it was intended to help manage en route traffic. She says air traffic control is a mishmash of different systems, some going back to radio, telephones, and floppy disks, and that new computer systems often have difficulty working with older systems. She says it is "too much coincidence" that the outage happened on the day the new system was due to start, but she says she does not know if they are linked. The video cites Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy saying the nationwide ground stop affects all US airports and that a communication issue is impacting all air route traffic control centres, with FAA technicians investigating. Brian Stelter describes long lines before security at Newark Airport, people debating whether to enter, and departure boards that appear not to have caught up with the ground stop. Mary Schiavo says travellers will feel effects for several days because aircraft fly 83 to 90 percent full or more and there is not a lot of excess capacity for rebooking.