TIGER RAG NEWS SERVICES
The Texas Longhorns football team may have to consider the six-hour-plus bus ride from Austin, Texas, to Baton Rouge tonight or early Saturday to get to their game against LSU scheduled for 6:30 on ABC in Tiger Stadium on Saturday night.
No. 6 Texas (7-2, 5-2 Southeastern Conference) was boarded on its plane in Austin for the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport just before 3 p.m. central time Friday for the 90-minute flight to Baton Rouge to play No. 21 LSU (6-3, 3-3 SEC). Texas and LSU are scheduled to play in Tiger Stadium for the first time since 1953. After LSU beat Texas in Austin in 2019, Texas was scheduled to play the next season in Baton Rouge, but that game was canceled due to COVID.
At 2:56 p.m. central time Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights nationwide because of telecommunications outages at regional air traffic control centers across the country. The Longhorns deplaned and traveled back to the football facility on campus.
The FAA said the ground stoppage was imposed “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said there is a communications issue affecting the 22 regional air traffic control centers that direct planes en route between airports nationwide and that FAA technicians are investigating. It is the first nationwide ground stop since January of 2023 when a critical FAA computer system malfunctioned. Before that, there was the ground stop on Sept. 11, 2011, after the 9/11 attacks on the United States in New York City and Washington D.C. by the al-Qaida Islamist militant terrorist organization.
“There is not threat to the United States,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a press conference on Friday afternoon. “This was a telecommunications outage throughout the FAA. Out of an abundance of caution, we have grounded all the flights, and all are accounted for. The flights in the air will be case by case.”
The flight travel stoppage and telecommunications outage came on the heels of a global Microsoft outage on Thursday.
“There was no indication that this was a nefarious attack against us,” Mullin said. “It’s just a telecommunications outage. Everybody’s safe. There’s no reason to be concerned about your loved ones if they’re flying.”
As of late Friday afternoon, there was no timeline for the grounded flights to be rescheduled or when the flights in the air would land.
Mullin said investigators will be investigating if there is any link between the telecommunications outage and the FAA’s nationwide rollout of new AI artificial intelligence system.
The government has been working to overhaul the outdated technology that air traffic controllers rely on since Congress approved $12.5 billion for the project last year. Miles of old copper wires have been replaced with fiber optic lines, and old radio systems are gradually being replaced at airports across the country.
But much work remains. Duffy has said that another $30 billion will be needed to complete the work, and the White House has begun lobbying Congress to approve it.
The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast, aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said, except this time on a nationwide scale. It may be linked to the outdated technology used by air traffic controllers.
Friday’s ground stop was different than the one after Sept. 11 because planes were not being told to land immediately and pilots likely were able to communicate with ground controllers at airports, Arroyo said.
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