This story was originally published by Columbus Business First, a Delaware Source content-sharing partner.
UPDATE, 9:56 P.M. — The Federal Aviation Administration said airplane departures can resume Friday after lifting a nationwide ground stop caused by communications problems, according to reporting from the Associated Press.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that outages of the U.S. air traffic control system were caused by an overload of an old, analog system. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin called for further funding to improve the system.
Duffy warned Americans traveling that getting planes back in the air may take time and that getting air traffic back to normal would be slow.
The Federation Aviation Administration has issued a so-called “ground stop” to air traffic nationwide, halting planes from departing any airport for an undetermined amount of time in a rare move for the agency.
The FAA advisory stated that “Due to extraordinary circumstances and reason of safety” that all departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice, with international flights being managed on a case by case basis.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed on social media platform X the nationwide ground stop and attributed it to a “communication issue impacting all air route traffic control centers.”
“FAA technicians are investigating the issue. We will provide immediate updates as we have them.”
John Glenn Columbus International Airport acknowledged the ground stop in a Facebook post and urged travelers to check with their airline for the latest flight information before heading to the airport.
Delaware Source reached out to city of Delaware officials, who reported no issues at Delaware Municipal Airport–Jim Moore Field.
Located at 1075 Pittsburgh Drive, the city-operated airport is home to approximately 100 aircraft and handles an estimated 40,000 takeoffs and landings annually, including corporate, flight training and recreational flights.
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The FAA has been in the spotlight before, as the Trump Administration threatened to cut 10% of flights at major airports in response to a partial government shutdown in late 2025. For years the FAA and others have warned about staffing shortages causing issues for the nation’s air transportation.
A Government Accountability Office report from early 2026 found that the number of air traffic controllers in the U.S. had declined by about 6% in the last decade, while there was a 10% increase in the number of flights that rely on that system. The GAO report attributed much of these issues to repeated government shutdowns over the last two decades, the covid-19 pandemic suspending training, and unexpected attrition from 2019 to 2024.
Those have led to delays and other issues, including tarmac delays, which have become more notable in recent years. Passengers are spending more time on airport tarmacs, according to a review of Federal Aviation Administration data by The Business Journals. The average departure taxi time — the time it takes from when your plane leaves its gate to when its wheels lift off the ground as it takes off — increased from 17.82 minutes in 2019 to 18.26 minutes in 2024 across 82 major U.S. airports.
Arrival taxi times tend to be far shorter than their departure counterparts, but that time period — the time from when a plane’s wheels touch the runway to when it connects to a jetway — has gotten longer since the pandemic as well, according to The Business Journals’ analysis, rising to roughly 8.71 minutes on average in 2024, up from 8.21 minutes in 2019 across the 82 airports tracked.
