Open Veils · Answer
What happened in America that all flights were cancelled recently?
A catastrophic ATC communications collapse on November 13, 2026 — the longest US airspace shutdown since 9/11 — grounded all departing domestic flights for roughly five hours. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy publicly attributed the failure to 1980s-era copper-wire infrastructure and overloaded analog switches and routers. Critics and infrastructure researchers have long warned this moment was inevitable given decades of deferred modernization of the FAA's backbone systems.
Evidence
- On November 13, 2026, the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop beginning around 12:30 p.m.
- The FAA also requested Eurocontrol — covering 42 member states including Turkey, Morocco and Israel — to suspend US-bound flights, making this a transatlantic disruption.
- EST after analog switches and routers in its air traffic control system became overloaded with data, causing system-wide communication failures.
- Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed the agency still runs on 'old, old switches, old routers' and 1980s copper telephone lines — infrastructure that researchers like Catherine Austin Fitts have long identified as symptomatic of chronic, deliberate underfunding of critical public systems.
- EST, more than 3,500 aircraft had been airborne at the moment of shutdown (per Duffy's own statement).