FAA Lifts Grounding Of Flights Nationwide After Several Hours

The FAA has lifted the nationwide grounding of flights that is impacting travel to (among many other things) several wrestling events to come this weekend. As reported earlier on Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered the ground stop of all flights in the US due to communication issue affecting air traffic control, with the federal agency noting that the order was “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.”

CNN reports that the FAA lifted the grounding around 8:30 PM ET. The ground stop was in effect for roughly four hours.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said that the issue came from old air traffic control technology and overloaded routers. Duffy said, “Our routers actually got overloaded with data, and… they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”

CNN reports that 7,659 flights were canceled as of 11:18 PM ET. It’s not clear if the resumption of flights will allow talent who had not yet flown into Pheonix to get to the show on time; it was noted by Duffy that it may take time to get planes back in the air, and getting air traffic back to normal would be slow.

TNA also has Destination X taking place on Sunday. Bryan Alvarez reported at F4W Online that most of the Destination X team were set to fly into Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on Saturday, so that show may be impacted as well.