NEW DELHI: Air India’s Delhi-San Francisco (SFO) nonstop was over the Pacific and just about two hours away from its destination, when the US ordered a ground stop on Friday the 13th when Uncle Sam’s outdated air traffic control (ATC) systems began to fail. There were four other AI nonstops, all to New York via the Atlantic route, but they were further away from their destinations. Luckily, the US Air Traffic Control System Command Centre (ATCSCC) advisory issued at 2.24 am (IST of Nov 14) to announce the ground stop said “inbound international flights will be managed on a case by case basis” while asking all departing flights to remain on ground. The Boeing 777 (VT-ALS) landed in SFO at 5 am.“As soon as the ATCSCC advisory was issued at 2.24 am, AI flight operations buzzed the leadership team and they went into a huddle. SFO flight was the closest to its destination and proceeded since the pilots, who were in touch with Oakland control at that time, were not told to divert as per the advisory which meant the B777 will be allowed to land,” said people in the know.AI kept a close eye on the developing situation and the four other flights — one each from Delhi and Mumbai to Newark (EWR) and JFK — kept proceeding to their destinations. The outage lasted about five hours and these all landed as per schedule.Of the five return flights these aircraft were to operate back home, only SFO-Delhi (via Kolkata) was delayed by about 2 hours and 40 minutes due to congestion at SFO. “All the other flights, two each out of EWR and JFK, operated on time,” said an official, adding Saturday-Sunday night departures were also on time except for the delayed arrival from SFO.AI senior pilots said this is the second time in less than four years that US faced an air traffic communication issue, although Friday the 13th was by far the most serious one. On Jan 10, 2023, the US Federal Aviation Administration was unable to issue notice to airmen (NOTAM) for some hours and it had to activate a hotline to manage the situation then. The FAA subsequently traced the problem to files unintentionally deleted by contract personnel while correcting synchronisation between the primary and backup databases.Following Friday’s failure, the US is prioritising international flights over domestic ones and the situation will take some days to recover as there will be a serious ripple effect. While Air India is the only Indian operator that flies to the US, two US carriers — United and American — have a daily each between Delhi and New York. Rest of the connectivity is provided by onestops of Gulf, European and southeast Asian carriers.
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Other airlines’ flights were also impacted.“Given the scale of the failure, the impact was massive. I was listening to ground control at JFK when the issue happened just before 4 pm EST (New York time) Friday. There were a lot of frustrated pilots and controllers. Hundreds of pilots were asking, ‘what’s the delay reason,’. Initially controller couldn’t give a reason and just said, ‘nationwide stop.’ Later it was determined a communication problem,” said a pilot who was in New York at that time.“Due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety, attention all aircraft operators: By order of the Federal Aviation Command Centre, all airports are ground stopped,” the ATCSCC advisory announcing the failure had said.