Nationwide ground stop: Aviation expert joins Boston 25 News as flights halted across US

It's very rare and yeah the last time one has happened nationwide like this was 9/11 to tell you how serious this is. So you know that means any aircraft on the ground at any airport in the United States is not allowed to take off. There are some aircraft I understand that are airborne that are still being allowed to continue I believe. That's at least the last word I got, that anything that's up there, airborne, is allowed to continue to its destination, at least at this time. That was the last update I got. Well, I mean, FAA's had a lot of technical issues, okay? So this obviously falls into that realm. I'm told these were rolling sort of communication blackouts from center to center. The FAA system is made up of local towers at each airport. Boston, for instance, has a tower on the airport. But then there are centers that once you take off out of Logan, you're handed off to a center depending on where you're going, whether you're going overseas or whether you're going westbound, southbound, you're handed off to centers. There's Boston Center, there's a New York Center, Indianapolis Center, and those continue across the country to guide aircraft that are at altitude at, you know, 20, 30. by 38,000 feet and there's thousands of aircraft up there that the centers are handling and they in turn hand off as they finish with an aircraft and it leaves their area of responsibility they hand it to the next center. So those are the areas in FAA that are experiencing technical outages at this time which has caused the ground stop nationwide. Well, if there is one, the FAA is going to put them on the ground immediately, but they seem confident that whatever systems they've got up working, they're able to handle them because the system's not being overloaded. They've got everything on the ground stopped, so they're just dealing with aircraft that have been up there, and they feel confident they can handle it at this time. Right now it's a major inconvenience and there's going to be delays and these delays are going to be significant and they're going to continue probably through the weekend because a number of flights are going to be out of position, crews are going to time out, you're going to have some flights that will go, others are going to cancel, then they're going to have to rebook those passengers heading into one of the busiest travel weeks of the year starting on Sunday, which is the Thanksgiving business travel week next week. Very, very difficult. I mean, this is a very, very difficult situation. There were people on that, as you indicated, and it's leaned over to its side. Hopefully, they're able to stabilize themselves and stay out of the water that's obviously going to penetrate a portion of the ship. Fortunately, it's not totally sunk. So. There were first responders on the scene immediately. You've got those tugboats that are in the water, and they're doing everything they can to rescue, and hopefully everybody's going to be okay. But that's a very tense and dangerous situation breaking right now.