The FAA ground stop left Philadelphia travelers stranded and frustrated

Travelers in Philadelphia were left stranded, confused, and frustrated Friday after federal authorities issued a rare nationwide ground stop.

All flights were grounded shortly before 4 p.m., due to a communication issue affecting air traffic control centers, a spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

Hundreds of flights into and out of Philadelphia International Airport were delayed or canceled Friday evening, according to data from flight tracking website FlightAware.

A spokesperson for the airport said European-bound flights had resumed about 6 p.m., but there was no timeline for when domestic flights could take off again, upending travel plans on the cusp of the weekend.

And as the ground stop dragged on, travelers stayed glued to their phones, awaiting crucial updates — or scrolling for last-minute lodging and rideshares hit by surge pricing. With each hour, more abandoned their itineraries.

Redondo Beach, Calif.-based attorney Tessa Duxbury said she’d been on a plane ready to return to Los Angeles when she got the news.

“People were just exasperated and upset,” she said.

By the time she checked her phone, all the airport hotels were full. She booked a hotel in Chester just in case her flight back to L.A. — delayed until 8 p.m. — was canceled. By 6:30 p.m., it was.

Sabrina Bonn, 40, and her boss tried to glean how likely it’d be for them to get a flight home to Louisville, Ky., considering the inevitable residual delays even if the ground stop was lifted.

“We’re trying to find a charging station, plug up, and make a decision,” she said, later adding, “We might just drive.”

Many flights that had already departed when the ground stop was issued continued to their destination, with passengers describing having little to no information about what was happening below.

Kristen Hand was in the air, about 120 miles outside of Philadelphia, when her flight’s captain notified the passengers of a problem with communications towers.

“It was definitely a little scary for me,” she said, thinking, “Are we going to land safely if the towers aren’t working?”

The FAA last took the extraordinary step of grounding all flights in January 2023, when a U.S. aviation warning system crashed. Before then, it was after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said there was no reason to believe a terrorist attack was behind the outage. Mullin hedged when pressed if he could definitively rule out a cyberattack.

Officials were also “looking at” whether the expansion of an AI-powered air traffic management system played a role.

“We are taking a look, we’re working with our counterparts throughout all agencies,” Mullin told reporters when asked about a possible link between the new system and the ground stop.

Bri Laverdure, of British Columbia, Canada, flew out of Victoria, had a layover in Seattle, and was expecting one more layover on her long journey to Barcelona, Spain, for a technology conference that she planned to follow up with a vacation.

Now stuck in Philadelphia, she recounted her friend’s advice, which she had not heeded: “Don’t fly through America,” Laverdure said.

Laverdure had no idea that the FAA was grounding flights until a news story popped up on her phone shortly before the flight arrived.

“With the Microsoft outage, and everything going on with AI, it makes you wonder,” Laverdure said. (Microsoft said it has no indication the ground stop was related to the service disruption that took Outlook and other services offline Thursday, a spokesperson for the company told The Associated Press.)

Jim Donahue, of St. Louis, had been in Philadelphia all week for his job in medical sales — a role that has taken him around the world and acclimated him to going with the flow.

“It just tells me we live in a dangerous world,” he said.

Staff writer Emily Bloch and the Associated Press contributed to this article.