Nationwide ground stop lifted, thousands of flights delayed

Well, we begin with a massive disruption to air travel across Washington and the entire country. The FAA grounded flights nationwide for hours today, but just lifted that ground stop minutes ago. Here's a look at SeaTac International Airport this afternoon where flights were at a standstill. The FAA issued the ground stop due to a communications problem at a regional air traffic control centers that direct planes between airports nationwide. The Department of Homeland Security says there's no indication yet. This was a nefarious attack, and it's just a telecom outage. The ground stop lasted for more than four hours, but departures can now resume. Reporter John Hopper's dad was on a flight out of SEA into Los Angeles when the ground stop was issued and filed this report shortly before the ground stop was lifted. Take a listen. Okay guys we just got off the plane but we had to sit on the tarmac for up to close to two hours because once we landed on time there was nowhere to put our plane because of course we get the full ground stop there's so many planes here there's so many people trapped basically right now in the airport we're here at LAX there's not a lot of seats available and it makes you wonder if You have to sleep here tonight, but that's gonna be fun. But if we look at the big board right now, nothing is, most of this one's not canceled just yet, but there's a lot of delays, and that's always the first step, is to delay the flight until another time, and then ultimately, though, it could be canceled if this full ground stop continues. So we're gonna see what happens here. We are connecting here from LAX, we're supposed to be going to another destination, which we were going to have a four hour layover anyway. So we're on schedule. But if we get on that flight, fingers crossed, we'll see what happens. I'm not holding out a whole lot of hope for that tonight because we're hearing these rumors that the airlines may the big airlines may choose to just cancel all flights tonight and try to start over tomorrow with the situation. We're not getting a lot of information, in fact the pilots never mentioned anything during the flight even though I was on wi-fi and watching everything go down and hearing about it and seeing it on social media. We were never told anything. The people sitting next to me were watching the new Spider-Man movie completely unaware and then we eventually landed on time but again once we got on the ground that's when the pilot said there is something going on with the system and so we're going to have to sit here a while to figure out where we're going. Where we can go and park this plane and get people off of it. That just happened, so we're in a hold mode here at lovely LAX. The exact cause of the communications issue remains under investigation. This is the first nationwide ground stop since January of 2023 when a key FAA computer system malfunctioned. Before that, the last time had been after the September 11th attacks.